Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Canonical tag use for ecommerce product page detail
-
Hi,
I have a category page I want to rank. This page has 24 different products quite similar but not exactly the same.
I want to use canonical tag in any product to the parent category.
Is this a right use of the canonical?
Category page I'm talking about is : Finger bitsIf I understand how to use canonical tags I can improve all my category pages.
thanks
marco
-
Hii,
The canonical tag plays a vital role in optimizing eCommerce product page details, helping to prevent duplicate content issues and enhance SEO performance.
-
Ok, thank you. now it's clear and it makes sense

take care
marco -
Even though your product titles have lower search volume, you still want to use your product detail pages as the preferred ranking URL for any product-specific query. This is where the benefit of long-tail keywords comes into play, you'll get a lot less traffic from them, but the quality (likelihood of them converting/purchasing) is much higher.
Take the 'Nicolai – 8th Wonder finger bit – Granite' for example. If I've done a Google search for that, my research is already done and I know exactly what I need. If I click on a result that takes me to a category page, that's not going to be as useful to me. But if the search result is for the product detail page, I'm landing on the exact page I want. It's got all the product info & specs I need, pricing, and most importantly, an Add to Cart button.
Hope that's helpful. For more info on ecomm SEO, I'd recommend taking a look at back through some of the Moz posts on the subject: https://azwa.1clkaccess.in/blog/category/e-commerce
-
Hi Logan,
thank you for your answer.
I will follow your suggestion.But this is is really something I'm interesting in deeply understand.
If I have a category with many products
category1 with products' titles: cat1 p1, cat1 p2, cat1p3, cat1 p4,cat1 p5, cat1 p6..
category2 with products' titles: cat2 q1,cat2 q2,cat2 q3,cat2 q4,cat2 q5,cat2 q6,cat2 q7,cat2 q8,cat2 q9I know that 90% of searches are for the "category keywords" because specific product title is so specific that has low volume search.
I want to avoid that these product pages are all of low authority because rank for the same long term keyword that is exactly the category. With a big effort I can write different descriptions but they will rank anyway all the the big hat keyword as well. isn't it.
I think this is one of the most common SEO issue for e-shops.
Any resources where I can learn more?
ciao -
Marco,
Do not proceed with that task, it is not the proper way to use a canonical tag. If you put a canonical tag pointing a product to a category page, the product URL will eventually get removed from the index and therefore won't drive any traffic for product-specific queries.
You mentioned "24 different products quite similar but not exactly the same", is Moz flagging them as duplicates? If so, I'd recommend differentiating these products more. You could write more robust descriptions or add user-generated content such as reviews or Q&A.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Product Schema Markup for All Products
Hi Team, Google search console used to allow you to use their structured data markup helperhttps://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper/u/0/ to markup multiple product pages at once that were similar. I do not see this feature anymore with the new search console. Does anyone have a recommendation for marking up multiple product pages without having to have schema markup firing in GTM for each product page?
Technical SEO | | agrier0 -
Quick Fix to "Duplicate page without canonical tag"?
When we pull up Google Search Console, in the Index Coverage section, under the category of Excluded, there is a sub-category called ‘Duplicate page without canonical tag’. The majority of the 665 pages in that section are from a test environment. If we were to include in the robots.txt file, a wildcard to cover every URL that started with the particular root URL ("www.domain.com/host/"), could we eliminate the majority of these errors? That solution is not one of the 5 or 6 recommended solutions that the Google Search Console Help section text suggests. It seems like a simple effective solution. Are we missing something?
Technical SEO | | CREW-MARKETING1 -
Canonical for duplicate pages in ecommerce site and the product out of stock
I’m an SEO for an ecommerce site that sells shoes I have duplicate pages for different colors of the same product (unique URL for each color), Conventionally I have added canonical tags for each page, which direct to a specific product URL My question is what happens when a product which the googlbot is direct to, is out of stock but is still listed in the canonical tag ?
Technical SEO | | shoesonline0 -
Is it better to use XXX.com or XXX.com/index.html as canonical page
Is it better to use 301 redirects or canonical page? I suspect canonical is easier. The question is, which is the best canonical page, YYY.com or YYY.com/indexhtml? I assume YYY.com, since there will be many other pages such as YYY.com/info.html, YYY.com/services.html, etc.
Technical SEO | | Nanook10 -
Can I use a 410'd page again at a later time?
I have old pages on my site that I want to 410 so they are totally removed, but later down the road if I want to utilize that URL again, can I just remove the 410 error code and put new content on that page and have it indexed again?
Technical SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Ecommerce website: Product page setup & SKU's
I manage an E-commerce website and we are looking to make some changes to our product pages to try and optimise them for search purposes and to try and improve the customer buying experience. This is where my head starts to hurt! Now, let's say I am selling a T shirt that comes in 4 sizes and 6 different colours. At the moment my website would have 24 products, each with pretty much the same content (maybe differing references to the colour & size). My idea is to change this and have 1 main product page for the T-shirt, but to have 24 product SKU's/variations that exist to give the exact product details. Some different ways I have been considering to do this: a) have drop-down fields on the product page that ask the customer to select their Tshirt size and colour. The image & price then changes on the page. b) All product 24 product SKUs sre listed under the main product with the 'Add to Cart' open next to each one. Each one would be clickable so a page it its own right. Would I need to set up a canonical links for each SKU that point to the top level product page? I'm obviously looking to minimise duplicate content but Im not exactly sure on how to set this up - its a big decision so I need to be 100% clear before signing off on anything. . Any other tips on how to do this or examples of good e-commerce websites that use product SKus well? Kind regards Tom
Technical SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
Duplicate page titles on Ecommerce
Hi, My question is in reference to an E-commerce site- Our SEO MOZ scan is showing many errors for Duplicates- such as Duplicate titles - The majority of these are on the products map- and the page titles are Products Map :: Company Name How do we get correct this or does Google not penalize for it? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | frankrizzo0 -
Do I need to add canonical link tags to pages that I promote & track w/ UTM tags?
New to SEOmoz, loving it so far. I promote content on my site a lot and am diligent about using UTM tags to track conversions & attribute data properly. I was reading earlier about the use of link rel=canonical in the case of duplicate page content and can't find a conclusive answer whether or not I need to add the canonical tag to these pages. Do I need the canonical tag in this case? If so, can the canonical tag live in the HEAD section of the original / base page itself as well as any other URLs that call that content (that have UTM tags, etc)? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | askotzko1