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.
How to handle dynamic product url that changes regularly
-
Hey Moz,
It's actually my first post - although I look at the Q&As on a daily basis!
I was hoping to get your opinions on how to handle dynamic product url that can change regularly.
Before we start, our product page urls get populated by the product titles.
So the situation is this.
- Let’s say we have a product url: /product/12345-abcde-fghj/
- Then the client decides to change the title a week later, so the url changes with it to): /listing/12345-klm-qjk
- Another week later, the agent changes to: /listing/12345-jkhfk-jhf-kjdhfkjdhf
So to note, the product ID will always remain the same.
Naturally, 301 redirecting every time would cause a bit of page authority to be lost every time 301ed. Also potentially creating new a few hundreds of 301 redirect daily sounds totally mental. (I have been informed by the dev we expect a few hundreds to change url daily) Although I understand there’s no limit on how many 301s you can have on a single domain, this would look completely unnatural - really not ideal.
So the potential solution we thought was:
we’ll keep the original url, and make sure that is the only url that will get indexed**/product/12345-abcde-fghj/**and put canonical tag on any of the new urls, directing to the original url. The problem we will have then is that the most current url may not exactly match the description of the product -wouldn’t be ideal for ux.
Has anyone had dealing with issues like this in the past? Would love to get your input!
Many Thanks
-
Thanks Everett! yes there's definitely seo benefit from having the title in the URL, and I think it's pretty significant - from what I have seen previously when we made a massive url changes for one of the websites I worked on - went from /{id}/ to {id}-{product-title}. Also there is a study shows that display url in search results is still a prominent element to influencing searchers' clicks. This is from 2012 but I think the same still applies today. http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/155941/domainbias.pdf so I'd prefer to have the titles included.
It is completely possible to make the very original static, and that would be my preferred option - but we need to assess whether the changes were made because they were "mildly" or "totally" incorrect in the first place, and also at the same time need to convince others - who feel keeping the original urls (when the product titles change) would worsen ux.
301 redirects would be totally mental - so this would not be an option. Also adding canonical tag to the "non-original" urls method - potentially ok in the short term.
I think using static (hardcoded) urls would be the only long-term solution.
-
Hi Patrick that's really helpful thanks,
Completely understand it's confusing, I was totally surprised myself to find out there were so many changes to the title on a daily basis.
I would personally have one static url (original url) so this page can carry on build authority. I'm going to find out what these changes that are being made may be.I mean if it's just the title changing and nothing else, the chances are that the original product title (& url) will still stay relevant - it may be that our clients are trying to optimise their title, or spelling error etc. - I'm not sure at this point but that will be my next job to find out!
I can't link to the site, as it is being worked for relaunch currently. Site relaunches are always terrifying
-
Hi there
This is very confusing haha. What I would suggest is, if the product itself stays the same while new items or features are added to it (the only reason I can think why URLs are changing - correct?), to create one static URL / page for the product and update the description as the product updates. I would also add Schema into the template of the product so that it dynamically pulls information from the description and let's crawlers know of the changes. You'll have to talk to your web development team to make sure this is possible.
This way, you have one static URL per product, with only descriptions / features changing. This will cut down on multiple URLs, redirects, canonicals, and overall, confusion. I would also take a look at this resource from inFlow; this is on duplicate content for eCommerce which it sounds like you might potentially run into.
Let me know if a. that I am on the right thought pattern here and b. that this helps. You may want to link to your site so that the community can get a more indepth look! Hope this helps - good luck!
Patrick
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
-
Dynamically Inserting Noindex With Javascript
Hello, I have a broken plugin creating hundreds of WP-Content directory pages being indexed by Google. I can not access the source code of these pages to add a noindex to them. The page URL's all have the plugin name within them. In order to resolve the issue, I wrote a solution with javascript to dynamically add in a noindex tag to any URL containing the plugin name. Would this noindex be respected by Google and is there a way to immediately check that it is respected? Currently, I can not delete the plugin due to issues with it's php. If you would like to view the code: https://codepen.io/trodrick/pen/Gwwaej?editors=0010 Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
What's the best way to handle product filter URLs?
I've been researching and can't find a clear cut answer. Imagine you have a product category page e.g. domain/jeans You've a lot of options as to how to filter the results domain/jeans?=ladies,skinny,pink,10 or domain/jeans/ladies-skinny-pink-10 or domain/jeans/ladies/skinny?=pink,10 And in this how do you handle titles, breadcrumbs etc. Is the a way you prefer to handle filters and why do you do it that way? I'm trying to make my mind up as some very big names handle this differently e.g. http://www.next.co.uk/shop/gender-women-category-jeans/colour-pink-fit-skinny-size-10r VS https://www.matalan.co.uk/womens/shop-by-category/jeans?utf8=✓&[facet_filter][meta.tertiary_category][Skinny]=on&[facet_filter][variants.meta.size][Size+10]=on&[facet_filter][meta.master_colour][Midwash]=on&[facet_filter][min_current_price][gte]=6.0&[facet_filter][min_current_price][lte]=18.0&per=36&sort=
Technical SEO | | RodneyRiley0 -
URL has caps, but canonical does not. Now what?
Hi, Just started working with a site that has the occasional url with a capital, but then the url in the canonical as lower case. Neither, when entered in a browser, resolves to the other. It's a Shopify site. What do you think I should do?
Technical SEO | | 945010 -
Product Variations (rel=canonical or 301) & Duplicate Product Descriptions
Hi All, Hoping for a bit of advice here please, I’ve been tasked with building an e-commerce store and all is going well so far. We decided to use Wordpress with Woocommerce as our shop plugin. I’ve been testing the CSV import option for uploading all our products and I’m a little concerned on two fronts: - Product Variations Duplicate content within the product descriptions **Product Variations: - ** We are selling furniture that has multiple variations (see list below) and as a result it creates c.50 product variations all with their own URL’s. Facing = Left, Right Leg style = Round, Straight, Queen Ann Leg colour = Black, White, Brown, Wood Matching cushion = Yes, No So my question is should I 301 re-direct the variation URL’s to the main product URL as from a user perspective they aren't used (we don't have images for each variation that would trigger the URL change, simply drop down options for the user to select the variation options) or should I add the rel canonical tag to each variation pointing back to the main product URL. **Duplicate Content: - ** We will be selling similar products e.g. A chair which comes in different fabrics and finishes, but is basically the same product. Most, if not all of the ‘long’ product descriptions are identical with only the ‘short’ product descriptions being unique. The ‘long’ product descriptions contain all the manufacturing information, leg option/colour information, graphics, dimensions, weight etc etc. I’m concerned that by having 300+ products all with identical ‘long’ descriptions its going to be seen negatively by google and effect the sites SEO. My question is will this be viewed as duplicate content? If so, are there any best practices I should be following for handling this, other than writing completely unique descriptions for each product, which would be extremely difficult given its basically the same products re-hashed. Many thanks in advance for any advice.
Technical SEO | | Jon-S0 -
Numbers in URL
Hey guys! Need your many awesome brains. 🙂 This may be a very basic question but am hoping you can help me out with some insights beyond "because Google says it's better". 🙂 I only recently started working with SEO, and I work for a SaaS website builder company that has millions of open/active user sites, and all our user sites URLs, instead of www.mydomainname.com/gallery or myusername.simplesite.com/about, we use numbers, so www.mysite.com/453112 or myusername.simplesite.com/426521 The Sales manager has asked me to figure out if it will pay off for us in terms of traffic (other benefits?) to change it from the number system to the "proper" and right way of setting up these URLs. He's looking for rather concrete answers, as he usually sits with paid search and is therefore used to the mindset of "if we do x it will yield us y in z months". I'm finding it quite difficult to find case studies/other concrete examples beyond the generic, vague implication that it will simply be "better" (when for example looking at SEO checklists and search engine guidelines). Will it make a difference? How so? I have to convince our developers of the importance and priority of this adjustment, or it will just drown in the many projects they already have. So truly, any insights would be so very welcome. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | michelledemaree2 -
How do I deindex url parameters
Google indexed a bunch of our URL parameters. I'm worried about duplicate content. I used the URL parameter tool in webmaster to set it so future parameters don't get indexed. What can I do to remove the ones that have already been indexed? For example, Site.com/products and site.com/products?campaign=email have both been indexed as separate pages even though they are the same page. If I use a no index I'm worried about de indexing the product page. What can I do to just deindexed the URL parameter version? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | BT20090 -
Why xml generator is not detecting all my urls?
Hi Mozzers, After adding 3 new pages to example.com, when generating the xml sitemap, Iwasn't able to locate those 3 new url. This is the first time it is happening. I have checked the meta tags of these pages and they are fine. No meta robots setup! Any thoughts or idea why this is happening? how to fix this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Is it worth setting up 301 redirects from old products to new products?
This year we are using a new supplier and they have provided us a product database of approx. 5k products. About 80% of these products were in our existing database but once we have installed the new database all the URLs will have changed. There is no quick way to match the old products with the new products so we would have to manually match all 5k products if we were were to setup 301 rules for the old products pointing to the new products. Of course this would take a lot of time. So the options are: 1. Is it worth putting in this effort to make the 301 rules? 2. Or are we okay just to delete the old product pages, let the SE see the 404 and just wait for it to index the new pages? 3. Or, as a compromise, should we 301 the old product page to the new category page as this is a lot quicker for us do do than redirecting to the new product page?
Technical SEO | | indigoclothing0