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Both pages have exactly the same content: the same subcategory text about company law and the same products. Only the path that a visitor has to follow to reach these pages is different.

Hi all,

A fairly common problem in webshops is having the same subcategory in multiple main categories. Let's take the following example:

• example.com/legal/economic-law/company-law
• example.com/tax/companies/company-law

I came across this interesting article on this topic:  https://moz.com/community/q/e-commerce-site-one-product-multiple-categories-best-practice

Although I understand that the answer on the above question is the most thorough method, I don't see a problem with just using canonicals either. On the webshop we are restructuring, there are only a few of these subcategories that return in multiple main categories, so generating a path via user activity and storing it in a cookie doens't seem really necessary to me.

Is it ok to just use canonicals or can this cause issues?

Thanks.

Hi,

This topic is quite old, but is still relevant.

I understand that the solution mentioned above is the most thorough one.

But is there something wrong with just using canonicals? In a webshop that we are managing, there are just a couple of subcategories that belong to different categories. An example:

• example.com/legal/economic-law/company-law
• example.com/tax/companies/company-law

Only these two URL's will generate duplicate content, since the categories above 'Company law' ('Economic law' and 'Companies') clearly have different content. Can't you just pick one version as the canonical one? Since we have just a couple of these categories, this is an easier solution.

Thanks for your feedback guys!

Hi,

I am using category pages on my blog, but what to do with a view all page of all the articles?

Example: articles 1-10 are in category A, articles 11-20 in category B and articles 21-30 in category C. But there is also a view all category page with articles 1-30.

Should I 'noindex' this page (although this isn't really duplicate content since the articles per page are not the same as in the separate categories) or can I just let it be indexed?

The question is why would you want to put the homepage of your webshop on a subdomain or subfolder?

I suppose your developer works with predefined frames for the pages of your webshop. If the homepage requires a different lay-out, the frame should be modified (custom coded). Same goes for your category or tag pages. These should have valuable content too and can't all be placed in different subdomains.

Regarding the use of subdomain or subfolder, this is a great article: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/subdomains-vs-subfolders-seo/239795/#close

I presume that this is for an educational institution. However, apart from making clear that your website is about an educational institution, it doesn't have any benefits.

If you want to redirect the .com version to the .edu version, you have to make sure that you have the right redirect strategy. Redirect pages to the right corresponding pages on the new domain using 301 redirects.

So to answer your question, I think the effort is bigger than the benefits.

Hi,

On a webshop we are optimizing, the main navigation consists of the 5 main categories to which all of the products can be assigned.

However, the main tabs in the navigation just activate a drop down with all of the subcategories. For example: the tab in the navigation is 'Garden equipment' and when you click on this tab, the drop down is shown with subcategories like 'Lawn mowers', 'Leaf blowers' and so on.

Now, the page 'Garden equipment' is one of the main category pages and we want this page to rank of course. This shouldn't be a problem, since there is a separate URL for this page that can be indexed and that can be reached through internal links on the website.

However, this page can not be reached when a visitor initially comes on the homepage of the webshop, since the tab in the navigation isn't clickable. This page will only be reached when a subcategory is selected, and then when the visitor goes back to the category page through the breadcrumb or through an internal link.

Is it a problem that these important overview category pages can not be reached immediately?

Thanks.

Hi,

I am checking the SEO for a website that has a homepage consisting of the 5 most important categories. These are represented by different images with the category title in clickable text in the image.

When I check the alt tags of the images they all have the following structure: brand - activities - locations - category.

So for each image alt text the items 'brand - activities - locations' are used and only the category changes.

Can this be seen by Google as spamming?

Hi,

Thanks for the answer and sorry for the late response.

I understand what you mean, but I still have the following question: there is no possibility to add extra content to the blog category pages, unless through source code. This means I can not add extra text on these pages, so these blog category pages just sum up all the different blog articles of which the titles are H2's. Will these pages ever rank, because it is not really unique content about one subject?

Thanks!

Thanks, this is a really helpful answer.

Thanks for the answer.

I know the 302 is the standard for a temporary redirect, but the reason I ask this question is that I came across a lot of articles that mention that 302's shouldn't be used, unless for testing a page for example.

Since http 1.1, the 307 redirect is used and this could be another option for a temporary redirect.

Any thoughts on this?

Hi,

I would like to redirect a small website that contains info about a specific project temporarily to a specific url about this project on my main website.

Reason for this is that the small website doesn't contain accurate info anymore. We will adapt the content in the next few weeks and then remove the redirect again.

Should I set up a 301 or a 302?

Thanks

Hi,

I am checking a website for SEO and I've noticed that a lot of pages from the blog have the following meta robots:

meta name="robots" content="follow"

Normally these pages should be indexed, since search engines will index and follow by default. In this case however, a lot of pages from this blog are not indexed.

Is this because the meta robots is specified, but only contains follow? So will search engines only index and follow by default if there is no meta robots specified at all?

And secondly, if I would change the meta robots, should I just add index or remove the meta robots completely from the code?

Thanks for checking!

Hi,

I have two questions regarding keyword cannibalization.

1. I am doing the SEO for a website that sells do-it-yourself packages for heating, bathrooms, ventilation and so on for new houses or for renovations.

The most important pages are the product pages (e.g. example.com/products/bathrooms) but there is also a blog divided into categories per product (e.g. example.com/category/bathrooms). The difference is clear: the product page focuses on the product itself, and the blog category page contains all blog posts relating bathrooms (tips, new materials, new innovations,...).

My question is if the product page and blog category page can compete with each other for the term bathrooms (although they have different content). Does it help or is it enough to direct internal links from separate blog posts to the most important page (being the product page) and back to avoid my category blog page to compete with my product page?

Another possibility would be to use a canonical tag on the category page pointing to the product page, but this actually isn't good practice because it isn't really duplicate content.

Third possibility would be to no index the category page. So what is the best solution of the three?

2. A second example of keyword cannibalization can be category archive pages for webshops. If you have a category page example.com/jeans and a subcategory page example.com/jeans/women, is it useful to optimize on both pages for different terms, being jeans for the first page and jeans for women for the second, or will Google not make this distinction because the keyword are too closely related?

In other words, is it useful to write content specifically for jeans for women and make a landing page for this keyword, or will this page compete with the category page that has been optimized for just the keyword jeans?

In large clothing webshops, you can see for example that there is an optimized page for Nike (content, headings,...) but not for Nike for women or Nike for men. Is this just laziness or is this done exactly to avoid keyword cannibalization?

Looking forward to your comments!

Hi Roman,

Thanks for the answer. I go into this question again, since just adapting the taxonomy and possibly adding some tags doesn't resolve the problem. It improves the UX, and creating a new structure was part of the planning anyway.

I just think we will be missing out on a lot of traffic because there are a lot of high volume keywords with low difficulty that are only applicable for the product itself (and not for a category, subcategory or tag).

There will be a copywriter assigned to write descriptions for every product anyway, exactly because of the fact that these products are so specific and need more explanation. If we take the keywords for a specific product and integrate them in the product description, I think we can surely rank with these product pages.

Do I see this wrong?

Thanks!

Hi,

I have a question concerning multilingual SEO for webshops. This is the case: the root domain is example.be, which has several subdomains. One of these subdomains is shop.example.be which is used for two webshops (Dutch and French), being shop.example.be/nl and shop.example.be/fr .
The other root domain is example.lu (for Luxemburg) which is only used for the subdomain for the Luxemburg webshop in French, being shop.example.lu/fr.
The content on the .lu/fr webshop is a small part of the content on the .be/fr webshop, and the product descriptions are the same and are both of course in French. The webshops will be redesigned and restructured, and the question is what to do with the .lu/fr webshop.

There are two possibilities:

• Integrate this webshop for Luxemburg in the existing .be webshop, since most of the products are the same and the .lu webshop doesn't get a lot of visitors because of Luxemburg being a small country. The only thing to do then would be setting up a 301 from the .lu webshop to the .be/fr version to transfer link value.
  People in Luxemburg already sometimes get pages from the .be/fr webshop in the SERP anyway because these already have a bigger authority than the .lu/fr pages.
• Keep the .lu/fr webshop and use hreflang tags so the correct pages with similar content are shown in the correct country. I know that when using different TLD's this normally isn't an issue anyway, so implementing hreflang tags even isn't really necessary.

Please feel free to share your thoughts about what would be the best approach.

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I have a question about embedding videos on a website: if you optimize the title and description for the video in Youtube, will these be taken into account for the ranking of the page where the video is embedded? Or will only the Youtube link for the video show in SERP's, instead of the page itself?

I've read in a post of Phil Nottingham that it's usually not a good idea to embed a Youtube video on your own site, but use Wistia instead, exactly to avoid cannibalisation of your own rankings. Is this correct?

Thanks!

Hi Roman,

Thanks for your answer. I share your point of view, but in this case I think it's a little bit different. Let me clarify it more, since my first question was too brief.

For example: if you have a webshop that specializes in machinery, you can have a category page for garden equipment which can be optimized for with this term. A subcategory could be lawn mowers, which can then be optimized too. For all the different individual lawn mowers, you can then use the specific type of lawn mower for optimizing on the product page itself.

In the case of the webshop that I am optimizing, it is different. The company sells books, e-books, software, magazines and trainings. These product types are all in the main navigation.
However, you can also use another main filter, being all of the areas of expertise. So you can choose 'Legal', 'Financial', 'Insurances' and so on. If you use this filter, you get all types of products (books, software,..) for these areas.

This gives two problems:

1. Optimizing on the main navigation pages, for example books, is difficult because I can't use keywords that are specific enough to get the right visitors to the webshop. If I would use the keyword phrases 'buy books', 'buy legal books', 'buy insurance books', then these are either too narrow or too broad.
2. Optimizing on the areas (legal, financial,...) is of course possible (for example buy financial books and financial software). There are subcategories in these areas (in the area 'Financial' for example 'VAT', 'Company taxes', 'Customs' are some of the subcategories) which I can optimize too, but still this will be too broad. The difference with the example of the lawn mowers is that every lawn mower does the same thing, cutting grass. With the products on this webshop, most of the products have very specific subjects with very specific keywords (with enough search volume) and the only possible level to optimize is the product level. For example in the area Financial > VAT there is a book about the VAT tarifs, and a book about VAT in the service sector. These two products handle about VAT, but both have specific keywords that I can optimize for.

To resume, I think I lose a lot of potential traffic if I don't optimise the product pages, since these products all have specific subjects. Changing the structure of the webshop isn't an option on the moment, and even if it would be I wouldn't go deeper then 3 levels.

I hope the question is more clear right now. Thanks for checking!

Hi,

I am doing extensive keyword research for the SEO of a big webshop. Since this shop sells technical books and software (legal books, tax software and so on), I come across a lot of very specific keywords for separate products.

Isn't it better to try and rank in the SERP's with all the separate product pages, instead of with the landing (category) pages?

Thanks for your answer Everett.

The structure was indeed created some years ago, when ranking with different subdomains wasn't really a problem. It is quite normal that there is an overlap between the webshop subdomain and other subdomains. The subdomains dive deeper into a specific part of the business (tax, legal, formations,...) but on the webshop all of these different products from the subdomains are sold.

However, for some search terms, some of the subdomains all rank on the first page. For example: https://www.google.com/search?q=successierekenaar&oq=successierekenaar&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j0.3257j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
As you can see, the root domain as well as two subdomains and a link to an app, take the first four positions in the SERP.

Key question is: if there is a possible search term to rank for, but one of the subdomains already ranks for this term, can it still be used? Otherwise, it won't be easy to find a unique search term with a high enough search volume for each product, since it is a market with very specific products.
On the other hand, if subdirectories were used, it basically comes down to the same: never try to rank two pages for the same search term.