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johnnyo11 View Drop Down
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    Posted: 10-March-2012 at 7:25pm
I am not sure if this is in the realm of your expertise but I will ask any way... 

My client babyblingstreet.com is using ProductCart for her site. She sells baby and toddler clothing. Now a lot of the links on her site contain the same the products. For instance: if you go to "What's new" you can find those same products in let's say her "Sale Items" link category. 

From an SEO perspective this is bad and considered duplicate content. What happens is that the spiders index both of these categories. Then it sees the exact same products in both categories and as a result, does not know which page to give authority to. So what happens is that the authority is split between all categories that have the exact same products. This greatly decreases the chances for any category to get ranked high in search engines since the spider does not know which category to give authority to. 

I was playing around with the idea of possibly doing a <meta name="robots" content="nofollow" /> but the way ProductCart built out their cart, there doesn't seem to be a way to isolate each category page. Usually, I can just do this in the <Head> section of each category page. However, this doesn't seem to be an option. Therefore, I went to the "inc_catsmenu.asp" page and tagged each link that I do not want indexed by search engines with rel=nofollow tag. So it would like something similar to this. 
<a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">Link text</a>
The only issue with this type of tag is that now when anyone links from their blog, social media site, website, etc... to one of these links that has the above tag, my client will not receive what is called the "link juice." Link juice is extremely important when it comes to SEO cause each unique IP address that links to a certain page on your site essentially is a vote of confidence that this page is good and worth ranking for on search engines. The reason this is a big issue is that I have no control over how a user browses the site. Even though I would not have the spiders index certain categories on her site, that still doesn't mean they can't go to these categories and then use the URL in these categories to create a link from their site, blog, social media site, etc.. which again, my client wouldn't get the link juice for if a person does this. 

So with all this said, I want to know if anyone here has any experience indexing e-commerce sites that have the same products in multiple categories on their site and what they did to resolve this issue from an SEO standpoint. 

I hope this makes sense. Thanks for your time. 
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Hamish View Drop Down
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Points: 56 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Hamish Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 10-March-2012 at 8:32pm
Hi,  What you need is a dose of canonical url's : http://wiki.earlyimpact.com/productcart/seo-canonical
By the way - Google do not punish or dilute page ranking due to duplicate content.
http://www.spottedpanda.com/2011/seo-news/confirmed-seo-facts-matt-cutts/

Regarding external links to the site, adding the nofollow would surely do more harm than good as it would negate the value of any link to a page you have got nofollow on completely without adding any "link juice" to your preferred page(s)?!


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johnnyo11 View Drop Down
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Points: 0 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote johnnyo11 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 10-March-2012 at 10:36pm
Right, I wasn't sure of you knowledge base when it came to SEO so I tried to be as general as possible. The real problem is that let's say my client sells a green dress and someone accesses it through the "baby and toddler dresses" category. And let's say this URL has 10 links pointing to it. Now, let's say someone else accesses this same green dress through the "What's new" category. And let's say this particular URL has 10 links pointing to it. Instead of having 20 links pointing to one URL about the green dress, I now have 10 URLs pointing to one URL and 10 pointing to another URL even though both URLs feature the exact same green dress with the exact same copy.

So now my issue here is that I need to figure out how to access every individual product page through ProductCart so that I can put a canonical tag on every instance of the green dress product page that so that I maximize all my incoming links. The way productCart is setup, I am unsure how to individually access every productpage through dreamweaver so that I can set a canonical tag on every product page that contains green dress. In this instance, I would want the canconical for the green dress to be the URL that is contained within "baby and toddler dresses" category because that particular keyword phrase receives the most search volume as oppose to a keyword "what's new".... Does that make sense?
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Greg Dinger View Drop Down
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Points: 238 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Greg Dinger Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 11-March-2012 at 12:01pm
<<<how to access every individual product page through ProductCart so that I can put a canonical tag on every instance of the green dress product page >>>

You might recall my mentioning yesterday (by e-mail) that you have the wrong includes-metatags.asp in the application.  I believe that you will see significant changes once this is resolved.  The correct file should result in canonical URLs appearing in the site.
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Hamish View Drop Down
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Points: 56 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Hamish Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 11-March-2012 at 1:28pm
Hi Greg is right, the correct Canonical URL's do not have any reference to the category in the url, or the odd characters that appear at the end of your URL's. 
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Hamish View Drop Down
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Points: 56 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Hamish Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 11-March-2012 at 1:39pm
... That is the URL's that appear on the address bar for customers will contain an indicator of the category still, but the canonical URL should not (view source your product pages). 
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 13-March-2012 at 1:31am
I'd like to add some fuel to the fire here:

I've got clients, including those up to 4.5 SP 1 using PC to generate site maps to feed to Google, et. al that include the categorID in the URL when the canonical URL option does otherwise. The two features seem to be out of sync with each other. That is the site map creates a URL that is then trumped by the canonical URL on page. This results in significant numbers of pages being submitted, but not indexed. This issue has been on my list since at least 4.1 release.
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Hamish View Drop Down
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Points: 56 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Hamish Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 13-March-2012 at 4:47am
Hi Sean, I'm on my phone right now, but I believe there is a fix available for this. It seems like something that should be on the 'just in' page, if not please raise a support ticket.
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Points: 20 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote whizzinpc Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 19-March-2012 at 5:20pm
Only problem I see with all of this is the Canonical URL that is generated doesn't really exist. The only page that will link to the canonical URL is the sitemap. The rest of the site includes a category ID in the URL string. PC should ditch the Category ID from the URL and all will be perfect. Maybe have a default category in the Control Panel for each product...so the breadcrumbs will show up correctly because if you use a canonical URL of a product the breadcrumb that is generated is based on the first category that you added the product to.
Also, in regards to Link Juice, if someone links to a product usually they will copy paste the URL.. so if the URL has the category id then you get a link to that page instead of the canonical version and 1 product can be in multiple categories so it gets all mixed up.

 
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 20-March-2012 at 12:32am
Originally posted by Sean@WMS Sean@WMS wrote:

I'd like to add some fuel to the fire here:

I've got clients, including those up to 4.5 SP 1 using PC to generate site maps to feed to Google, et. al that include the categorID in the URL when the canonical URL option does otherwise. The two features seem to be out of sync with each other. That is the site map creates a URL that is then trumped by the canonical URL on page. This results in significant numbers of pages being submitted, but not indexed. This issue has been on my list since at least 4.1 release.

I recant: canonical URLs in the XML site maps were addressed.

I crossed wires with it not having been addressed at the "store" map feature ... but then one might want product URLs there to be tagged with the category they were nested under there if they weren't looking at it as ANOTHER"site" map (in HTML rather than XML) for search engines to eat up. 

Seems to me it would be ideal if a store owner could have the option of whether or not to use canonical URLs for product links on the "store" map.

That being said, the UL layout in the "store" map has some serious issues if one opts to include products on it AND has subcategories with-in the same parent category level. The problem is that in each nested UL, the sub-category pages are on the same hierarchical level as the products assigned to the category above. So, the organization gets really funky when one uses several nested categories AND has products assigned to various category levels. Here's live example:

The layout gets a bit worse if one opts to use Heading tags.

It's an interesting issue to solve, but for now, I'd recommend store owners NOT opt to include products in their "store map" (web page), as opposed to their "site map" (XML document). This is more of a "logic" issue than something that may be an actual problem for real users.
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