Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello all.  I am optimising an E-Commerce site and I have a questions about Products in several categories & Canonical URL's.  Using Magento Platform.

site.com/category1/product1/     ( link from category is site.com/product1/ )
site.com/category2/product1/     ( link from category is site.com/product1/ )
site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1  ( link from category is the same , as is the canonical URL )
site.com/product1/  ( this is where other categories link to )

Canonical links for all the above is site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1  which takes care of duplicate content correctly.

I just wonder if we would get more link juice if ALL the links from all categories went to site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1  ( instead of some going to site.com/product1/ )

Thanks in advance

Yes - Duplicate Content is taken care of with SEO extension ( Canonical URL - you can set it ) I'm inclined to have the full URL in there because

-1 - if it ranks in the SERPs - then the full URL will rank - and you should be able to see the categories as clickable items in the SERPs  and

-2 - When you arrive at the page , you see breadcrumbs as the "how deep I am" and you can click on the next level up ( wheras if you just have the short link it has no "parent" if you know what I mean )

-3 Because the full URL is ranked in the SERPs - the breadcrumbs are links when google crawls the page - so each page carries a bit more link juice to relevant categories.

Make sense?

I'm a bit divided about the URL structure for ecommerce sites.

I'm using Magento and I have Canonical URLs plugin installed. My question is about the URL structure and length.

1st Way: If I set up Product to have categories in the URL it will appear like this

mysite.com/category/subcategory/product/  - and while the product can be in multiple places , the Canonical URL can be either short or long.

The advantage of having this URL is that it shows all the categories in the breadcrumbs ( and a whole lot more links over the site ) .  The disadvantage is the URL Length

2nd Way: Setting up the product to have no category in the URL

URL will be  mysite.com/product/

Advantage: short URL.  disadvantage - doesn't show the categories in the breadcrumbs if you link direct.

Thoughts?

I have to develop a strategy for link building.

The SEO guy I have been speaking with has started putting links on .edu sites etc .

To me - this "stinks" of manipulating the search engines - which I know we will get stung by at some point.

I hope this isn't standard practice - but I don't know what the best way to improve rankings in terms of links etc.

We sell health products and are starting to put out 3-4 high quality articles per week.

Ideas?

Kind Regards

Martin

Thanks for the reply

On their own page:  https://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

[excerpt]On smaller sites it might make sense to noindex either the category or the tag structure, but in my experience noindexing those on yoast.com does little to no change at all.

There is one type of archive that is noindex,follow by default as well in the WordPress SEO plugin: the search result pages. This is a best practice from Google for which a setting is left out as you should just have that anyway.

My thinking around this is that if people are looking for "Articles on topicx"  then this would be more relevant to their search query because it's a collection of exactly what they are looking for - and more geared towards the 'long tail"

Hi there.

I am using Yoast Wordpress Plugin. I just wonder if any test have been done around the effects of Index vs Noindex for Tag Pages? ( like when tagging a word relevant to an article )

Thanks

Martin

Thanks for the quick reply

Our writer is a doctor , so many of his references are .edu sites or pubmed trials etc - so certainly the links will be trusted - and I know that if you have inbound links from sites like that they are gold - just not sure about outbound .  I guess it shows some credibility that the articles are researched ...?  Just not sure how Google Views those.

Thanks

Hey People

We run an ecommerce site and we research and wrote articles on health topics , and we post the references on the articles in posts ( Magento site / Wordpress for articles )

Should I be putting rel=nofollow in the outbound links or not?

I have read a few different posts but none seem to definitively fit my situation.

Kind Regards
Martin

In Webmaster tools , Content keywords give an indication of what Google thinks a site is about.

This site is a health site ( online shopping - health supplements )  - but one of the terms it thinks the site is about is "Dollar" . I'm guessing this is because on every page there is Currency Selection from multiple currencies.

How do I tell Google that this part of the page is nothing to do with what my site is about?

Thanks for your reply in advance!

Had a bit of a "Gotcha" in Magento.

We had Yoast Canonical Links extension which worked well , but then we installed Mageworx SEO Suite.. which broke Canonical Links.

Unfortunately it started putting www.mysite.com/catalog/product/view/id/516/   as the Canonical Link -  and all URLs with /catalog/productview/*  is blocked in Robots.txt

So unfortunately We told Google that the correct page is also a blocked page. they haven't been removed as far as I can see but traffic has certainly dropped.

We have also , at the same time had some Site changes grouping some pages & having 301 redirects.

Resubmitted site map & did a fetch as google.

Any other ideas?  And Idea how long it will take to become unblocked?

Hello - Just getting in to a bit of Markup for rich snippets etc.

This site sells from New Zealand , but our target market is Australia and most of our sales are there and we locate it there in Webmaster tools.

Our Site changes currency / location automatically detecting IP Addresses.

So -primarily I have a product with multiple variations on one page that I want to show offers in Google.com.au - in Australian Dollars

Syntol Probiotic 
  90 caps $25AUD    180 Caps $50AUD     360 Caps 75AUD

Here is the page http://www.return2health.net/syntol.html

Ideas around that?  Ideally I would like to add some country specific data to it I guess..?