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Thanks Rob, That really does help tremendously. Your point about Google being 2-4 weeks behind the curve makes a lot of sense, so I hope that the work we're doing at the moment will start to bear fruit. That said, I can still see a lot of merit in the points you have raised. Yes, anything you can suggest to give me more to work with would be really helpful. Perhaps we can have a conversation away from here? My skype is: sushihosting Perhaps we can have a text chat there? Many thanks again, Bob

Hi there! Search engines have gotten smarter in the past few years and should be able to determine that the keyword (with AND without an apostrophe) means the same thing. I wouldn't worry about the keywords you're tracking and the keywords you're using within your content if the only difference is the apostrophe usage.

Hi Bob, The URL that displays next to the keyword and ranking will be the page of your website that ranks highest for that keyword. This isn't always necessarily the page that you want to be ranking, and may commonly be the homepage instead of the target landing page. You will have to use your own insight, data and SEO skills to decide whether the target landing page should be ranking instead of the homepage - and strategise a way to optimise your landing page and deoptimise the homepage for that keyword.

You can tell Google what URL parameters to ignore in Google Search Console. It's under Crawl > URL Parameters > Configure URL Parameters. Google does advise to use caution when changing how Google bot handles the parameters.

Further to the above, I think I've solved that issue. There was an error on that product you used as your example, it was loading an attribute as a variation that didn't exist. I've removed it now.

Hi Chris, Thanks for your response and suggestions. I think I've found a solution to all of the issues I'm currently experiencing! https://www.perfectseourl.com/ This should fix the -2 problem, as I can now dispense with the "product-category" slug completely and also follow your suggestion of going with the "womens" category name etc. Many thanks!

You would not set the canonical URL on the product page to your preferred category, that would send the signal that instead of having the product URL rank in search, you would prefer one of the product's categories, which would be incorrect. It sounds like since you've already set a canonical URL for certain categories, so you're on the right track. For instance if you have 5 categories with very similar lists of products on those pages, it sounds like you are canonicalizing 4 of those pages to the 1 most authoritative of the 5. In summary, you would only set a canonical for a product page if you had the same exact product spread across 5 different product pages. For example, if you had /mens-glasses/versace-primo/ and then for some reason every color had its own page because of your system, such as /mens-glasses/versace-primo/black, /mens-glasses/versace-primo/blue, /mens-glasses/versace-primo/red - then you would need the canonical on the product page back to the main page without the color subfolder. To address a part of your question, it's generally ok to assign the same product to multiple categories if that's useful to the user. Unless you have a massive site and you're maxing out your crawl budget, I don't think you need to sweat too much on duplicate content issues, unless you're receiving really strong negative signals. For instance, Moz might show that some of your pages are duplicate, but it's more informational, and you don't always need to take sweeping action. One strategy to fix duplicate content issues on category pages, is to write unique content for each category page and make the category page an actual destination page rather than just a navigational page.