Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

      Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Get found
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Canonical tag use for ecommerce product page detail

    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

    Technical SEO
    3
    6
    3289
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • amastone
      amastone last edited by

      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 bits

      If I understand how to use canonical tags I can improve all my category pages.

      thanks

      marco

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • davissmith122
        davissmith122 last edited by

        Hii,

        The canonical tag plays a vital role in optimizing eCommerce product page details, helping to prevent duplicate content issues and enhance SEO performance.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • amastone
          amastone last edited by

          Ok, thank you. now it's clear and it makes sense 🙂

          take care
          marco

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • LoganRay
            LoganRay @amastone last edited by

            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://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/blog/category/e-commerce

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • amastone
              amastone @LoganRay last edited by

              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 q9

              I 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

              LoganRay 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • LoganRay
                LoganRay last edited by

                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.

                amastone 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                • 1 / 1
                • First post
                  Last post

                Got a burning SEO question?

                Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                Start my free trial


                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.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • ahmadmdahshan

                  Missing Canonical Tag for a PDF document

                  canonical

                  Error: Missing Canonical Tag
                  But URL is not a webpage it is a PDF document, is this fixable?

                  Technical SEO | | ahmadmdahshan
                  0
                • bill369

                  Do Canonical Tags Pass Link Juice?

                  I have an ecommerce website where some pages link to a product page with a different URL. EXAMPLE: 1: /category/product1.html (not indexed by Google) with canonical pointing to product1.html Other page link to the product like below. 2: product1.html (indexed by Google) Now the question is, does 1: pass any link juice to product1.html or not? Is it worth to change everything and link only to one URL? My site is running on Magento!

                  Technical SEO | | bill369
                  0
                • SoulSurfer8

                  How long does it take for canonical tags to work

                  How long on average does it take for a canonical tag to work? Understand that canonicals are just a suggestion, but after adding a canonical tag and submitting the page via Google fetch, assuming Google follows the canonical, would you expect it to work after a day or two or does it take longer? We added canonicals to old PPC landing pages that are ranking organically, though our new landing pages (which we want to rank organically) are not identical and have a bit more content/features. They are similar though. Canonicals were added to the old pages (pointing to new pages) and requested indexing via search console. Old pages are still ranking and new pages not so much. FYI we are unable to 301 old PPC pages due to other non negotiable reasons unfortunately. Thanks.

                  Technical SEO | | SoulSurfer8
                  0
                • O2C

                  Blog Page Titles - Page 1, Page 2 etc.

                  Hi All, I have a couple of crawl errors coming up in MOZ that I am trying to fix. They are duplicate page title issues with my blog area. For example we have a URL of www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/1 and as we have quite a few blog posts they get put onto another page, example www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/2 both of these urls have the same heading, title, meta description etc. I was just wondering if this was an actual SEO problem or not and if there is a way to fix it. I am using Wordpress for reference but I can't see anywhere to access the settings of these pages. Thanks

                  Technical SEO | | O2C
                  0
                • Istoresinc

                  Does Title Tag location in a page's source code matter?

                  Currently our meta description is on line 8 for our page - http://www.paintball-online.com/Paintball-Guns-And-Markers-0Y.aspx The title tag, however sits below a bunch of code on line 237 Does the location of the title tag, meta tags, and any structured data have any influence with respect to SEO and search engines? Put another way, could we benefit from moving the title tag up to the top? I "surfed 'n surfed" and could not find any articles about this. I would really appreciate any help on this as our site got decimated organically last May and we are looking for any help with SEO. NIck

                  Technical SEO | | Istoresinc
                  0
                • ChrisRoberts-MTI

                  NoIndex/NoFollow pages showing up when doing a Google search using "Site:" parameter

                  We recently launched a beta version of our new website in a subdomain of our existing site. The existing site is www.fonts.com with the beta living at new.fonts.com. We do not want Google to crawl the new site until it's out of beta so we have added the following on all pages: However, one of our team members noticed that google is displaying results from new.fonts.com when doing an "site:new.fonts.com" search (see attached screenshot). Is it possible that Google is indexing the content despite the noindex, nofollow tags? We have double checked the syntax and it seems correct except the trailing "/". I know Google still crawls noindexed pages, however, the fact that they're showing up in search results using the site search syntax is unsettling. Any thoughts would be appreciated! DyWRP.png

                  Technical SEO | | ChrisRoberts-MTI
                  0
                • stukerr

                  Google counting numbers of products on category pages - what about pagination ?

                  Hi there, Whilst checking out the SERPS, as you do, I noticed that where our category page appears, google now seems to be counting the number of products (what it calls items) on the product page and displaying this in the 1st part of the description (see image attached). My problem is we employ pagination, so that our category page will have 15 items on it, then there are paginated results for the rest, with either ?page=2 or page-2/ etc. appended to the URL. Although this is only a minor issue, I was just wondering if there was a way to change the number of products displayed on that page to be the entire number of products in that category, is there a microformat markup or something that can over-ride what google has detected ? Furthermore is this system of pagination effective ? I have considered using javascript pagination, such that all products would be loaded on to the one page but hidden until 'paginated', but I was worried about having hidden elements on the page, and also the impact of load times. Although I think this may solve the problem and display the true number of products in a section! Any help much appreciated, Stuart b4urme.jpg

                  Technical SEO | | stukerr
                  0
                • 5225Marketing

                  How to handle sitemap with pages using query strings?

                  Hi, I'm working to optimize a site that currently has about 5K pages listed in the sitemap.  There are not in face this many pages.  Part of the problem is that one of the pages is a tool where each sort and filter button produces a query string URL. It seems to me inefficient to have so many items listed that are all really the same page.  Not to mention wanting to avoid any duplicate content or low quality issues. How have you found it best to handle this?  Should I just noindex each of the links?  Canonical links? Should I manually remove the pages from the sitemap?  Should I continue as is? Thanks a ton for any input you have!

                  Technical SEO | | 5225Marketing
                  0

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                • Digital Marketers
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.