Over the past few months I have been conducting lots of SEO Audits for a vast range of clients of all sizes. One thing that always seems to come out of the audit as a significant action is to look at the URL structure and duplicate content, with a special note for the product URL.
I find it extremely frustrating that with today’s technology and the skill set of most developers, CMS Platforms still generate multiple URLs for products associated with several categories. This instantly generates duplicate content for a single product, and if this is replicated across hundreds if not thousands of products, a serious duplicate content issue occurs.
To give you an example of what happens with some CMS Platforms (all CMS platforms are different), I have described a scenario below that is from the point of view of both a merchandiser and platform.
Merchandiser: a leading retailer has a new product that needs adding to the CMS.
CMS Platform: generate a generic URL that incorporates the product title and the SKU:
www.domain.com/product/product-title-plus-sku-number-011232
Merchandiser: the product that was added is a waterproof jacket; this fits into three categories, which were selected from the options available.
CMS Platform: generate three new URLs, BUT they are SEO friendly with keywords included.
www.domain.com/category/sub-category-1/product-title-plus-sku-number-011232
www.domain.com/category/sub-category-2/product-title-plus-sku-number-011232
www.domain.com/category/sub-category-3/product-title-plus-sku-number-011232
Merchandiser: the product is added to the correct brand
CMS Platform: another URL is created for the brand product.
www.domain.com/brand/product-title-plus-sku-011232
THREE MONTHS LATER: the winter season comes to an end, so the close of season sale is on.
Merchandiser: the product didn’t sell very well and was added to the sale.
CMS Platform: a new URL is created for the product that is now associated with the sale category.
www.domain.com/sale/product-title-plus-sku-number-011232
The scenario above describes adding the product to three different core categories, a brand and sale category, resulting in the creation of five different URLs to go with the generic product URL.
Now what is the issue with that, when they are keyword rich?
One of the biggest, if not THE biggest issue with e-commerce sites is the amount of duplicate content that is created, the majority by products and product listings. The above shows a perfect example of how duplicates are being created by multiple product URLs through CMS Platforms.
So how do you solve this issue? There are a couple of ways, depending on how far you are along with the CMS and how co-operative your web development team are.
1. When adding a product to the CMS, make sure that the platform creates just ONE generic URL (www.domain.com/product/product-title-plus-sku-number-011232 ) that can then be associated with multiple categories, brands, sale page etc. This will allow the merchandiser to select multiple categories to associate the product with, which will link through to the same URL. By ensuring the use of just one URL, the amount of duplicate content would be significantly decreased.
There are numerous large brands that are already using this method to good effect, although in slightly different ways, including:
John Lewis
http://www.johnlewis.com/27573/Style.aspx
http://www.johnlewis.com/173405/Style.aspx
Amazon:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0470554185
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sony-KDL32BX300-32-inch-Widescreen-Freeview/dp/B004AHKUJA/
2. If your web development team are unable to change the way the URLs are generated, speak to them about automatically creating a rel=”canonical” tag for each product with the generic URL added. This will provide the search engine with the generic URL to index instead of the other multiple URLs
3. If you are unable to implement either of the above recommendations, then I would suggest 301 redirecting the multiple URLs to the original generic URL. Before going ahead with this option, I would strongly urge you to try everything you can to get your web development team to implement either of the first two options. Option 3 will take up a considerable amount of time, with collating the different URLs for each product and then 301 redirecting them.
How does your current CMS generate product URLs? Is your web development team co-operative when you suggest SEO enhancements, or do your requests go unanswered? As a web developer, are you looking to improve the product from an SEO perspective? I look forward to hearing your views, not just from SEOs and Online Marketers, but also from web developers in the comments below or on Twitter – @danielbianchini.
Thanks for this, a concise examination of one of the major SEO pitfalls on product based sites. It’s worth adding to this the whole issue of internal search results within a site – using a site search often outputs a whole series of pages full of the same products. There may also be multiple ways to sort the products on the site, (such as by ratings, age, price, etc) again producing lots of duplication which needs handling.
Thanks for the comment. I agree that internal search provides a lot more product URLs that need to be handled correctly. In my experience a lot of internal search do not filter products very well anyway, and major improvements are still needed. Filtering products within the product listings has become something that a lot of eCommerce websites are adopting more, but on occasion they can go too far! Filtering such as price, colour and brand, are expected but when you have 10 different filter options you are instantly creating massive amounts of URLs depending on how they handled, but that is another post.
We are about to do a complete rebuild of our entire site and I would really like to hear what the best approach for creating URL’s while preserving any existing SEO would be? Does anyone have a list of suggestions for when you rebuild all of your product listings and content pages?
Great rundown. I find ecommerce sites a duplicate minefield generally, clients using generic product information from supplier cds etc. I find Magento works quite well out of the box but canonical tags do come in handy.
A great post i used your examples and restructured my site which increased visitors
my new product pages are now not duplicated as i was listing them in a brands page and in the category page which caused duplicate product page now i have used what you have mentioned in your post and structured them like this
cat page
http://www.theimpulsebuyer.co.uk/113/Fragrance-.html
Brand page
http://www.theimpulsebuyer.co.uk/113/Fragrance-/Miller-Harris/page-1.html
Product page
http://www.theimpulsebuyer.co.uk/113/Fragrance-/Miller-Harris/617741035-Miller-Harris-Noix-de-Tubereuse-Gift-Set.html
Thankyou for your help
Hi,
Great post, thanks! I have a additional question about handling breadcrumbs in case of a generic product url. Placing a product in different categories means different paths and thus breadcrumbs for the product. But what is the best way to store this path?
As far as i can tell the number of options are limited:
1) url path, but this is eliminated due to the generic product url;
2) session, the only “ugly” thing here is that sessions can expire. So a refresh of the product page after expiring results in loss of the path;
3) cookie, more or less like session, but feels ” redundant” to store in a cookie;
4) url querystring, add to url ?cat=10, but than is this seen as a new url?
What are your ideas on this?