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.
Fast/Easy Way to Implement Canonical tags in Bulk in Magento CMS?
-
Hello Amazing SEO Community!
Quick Q for a client with a TON of duplicate content. (yikes!)
My client is currently undertaking a large SEO project around canonical tagging for their thousands of duplicate pages. Currently, one product sits on multiple URLs and they are being indexed as different pages (with the same content). The issue is found across all products and other pages, and across their international sites as well.
One core challenge they face now is lack of time/resources from their developer side. The solution we see to the duplicate content is to manually add a canonical tag to each of our tens of thousands of pages. Their content management system is Magento.
Has anyone ever tackled canonicalization for a large site that uses Magento? Any more efficient solutions to manual tagging is ideal. Thanks in advance for your input.
-Bonnie
-
Thank you SO much Lynn! Much appreciated!
-
Hi,
Magento has some built in functionality to handle this to a degree. Go to System > Configuration > Catalog > Search Engine Optimisation and check 'Use canonical meta tag for products'. This should create a canonical for all product pages which point to a single page version without any category in the url.
Not sure how that will match with many international sites but if they are standalone then it should be ok. Worth checking out anyway, manually tagging thousands of pages... no thanks! It should be possible through a custom layout update in each product page, check this link for the suitable code and where it should be added.
Good luck!
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
-
Why is our noindex tag not working?
Hi, I have the following page where we've implemented a no index tag. But when we run this page in screaming frog or this tool here to verify the noidex is present and functioning, it shows that it's not. But if you view the source of the page, the code is present in the head tag. And unfortunately we've seen instances where Google is indexing pages we've noindexed. Any thoughts on the example above or why this is happening in Google? Eddy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eddys_kap0 -
Canonical Chain
This is quite advanced so maybe Rand can give me an answer? I often have seen questions surrounding a 301 chain where only 85% of the link juice is passed on to the first target and 85% of that to the next one, up to three targets. But how about a canonical chain? What do I mean by this:? I have a client who sells lighting so I will use a real example (sans domain) I don't want 'new-product' pages appearing in SERPS. They dilute link equity for the categories they replicate and often contain identical products to the main categories and subcategories. I don't want to no index them all together I'd rather tell Google they are the same as the higher category/sub category. (discussion whether a noindex/follow tag would be better?) If I canonicalize new-products/ceiling-lights-c1/kitchen-lighting-c17/kitchen-ceiling-lights-c217 to /ceiling-lights-c1/kitchen-lighting-c17/kitchen-ceiling-lights-c217 I then subsequently discover that everything in kitchen-ceiling-lights-c217 is already in /kitchen-lighting-c17 and I decide to canonicalize those two - so I place a /kitchen-lighting-c17 canonical on /kitchen-ceiling-lights-c217. Then what happens to the new-products canonical? Is it the same rule - does it pass 85% of link equity back to the non new-product URL and 85% of that back to the category? does it just not work? or should I do noindexi/follow Now before you jump in: Let's assume these are done over a period of time because the obvious answer is: Canonicalize both back to /ceiling-lights-c1/kitchen-lighting-c17 I know that and that is not what I am asking. What if they are done in a sequence what is the real result? I don't want to patronise anyone but please read this carefully before giving an answer. Regards Nigel Carousel Projects.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nigel_Carr0 -
How To Implement Breadcrumbs
Hi, I'm looking to implement breadcrumbs for e-commerce store so they will appear in the SERP results like the attached image. In terms of implementing to a site, would you simply add HTML to each page like this Google example? Which looks like this: Books › Science Fiction Award Winners Then is there anything you need to do, to get this showing in the SERPs results e.g. doing something in search console. Or do you just wait into google has crawled and hopefully starts showing in the SERPs results? Cheers. wn3ybMMOQFW98fNQkxtJkA.png [SERP results with bread crumbs](SERP results with bread crumbs)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jaynamarino0 -
How to stagger <h>tags?</h>
This might seem like a silly question, but It's one that I would like to get some responses from the SEO community. Do <h>tags need to be staggered according to the numbers? For example: A few of our clients have their h1 tag listed on a mid-way header that is halfway down their page, and there are both h2's and h3's listed before the h1 in the source code. Does this matter? Let me know!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TaylorRHawkins
Thanks! </h>2 -
Multiple H2 tags
Is it advisable to use only one H2 tag? The template designs for some reason is ended up with multiple H2 tags, I realise if any think it's that each one is that are important and it is all relative. Just trying to assess if it's worth the time and effort to rehash the template. Has anyone done any testing or got any experience? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman101 -
Null Alt Image Tags vs Missing Alt Image Tags
Hi, Would it be better for organic search to have a null alt image tag programatically added to thousands of images without alt image tags or just leave them as is. The option of adding tailored alt image tags to thousands of images is not possible. Is having sitewide alt image tags really important to organic search overall or what? Right now, probably 10% of the sites images have alt img tags. A huge number of those images are pages that aren Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Is a 301 Redirect and a Canonical Tag on Uppercase to Lowercase Pages Correct?
We have a medium size site that lost more than 50% of its traffic in July 2013 just before the Panda rollout. After working with a SEO agency, we were advised to clean up various items, one of them being that the 10k+ urls were all mixed case (i.e. www.example.com/Blue-Widget). A 301 redirect was set up thereafter forcing all these urls to go to a lowercase version (i.e. www.example.com/blue-widget). In addition, there was a canonical tag placed on all of these pages in case any parameters or other characters were incorporated into a url. I thought this was a good set up, but when running a SEO audit through a third party tool, it shows me the massive amount of 301 redirects. And, now I wonder if there should only be a canonical without the redirect or if its okay to have tens of thousands 301 redirects on the site. We have not recovered yet from the traffic loss yet and we are wondering if its really more of a technical problem than a Google penalty. Guidance and advise from those experienced in the industry is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ABK7170 -
Meta tags - are they case sensitive?
I just ran the wordtracker tool and noticed something interesting. The tool didn't pick up our meta description. It's strange as our meta descriptions appear in organic search results and Moz never reported missing meta descriptions.After reviewing other pages, I noticed our meta description tag is written as the following: name="Description" content=" I never thought about this, but are meta tags case sensitive? Should it be written as: name="description" content=" Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0