Categories Subcategories & Canonical Links

[massagestore]

I am hoping that someone with experience with large catalogs can help me out here. I have a large(r) store about to launch with 8 cats and many subcats, with some of them appearing in multiple cats. Even though they are the same name, 3d is assigning each subcat its own ID, and I am trying to figure out a way to not have so much duplicate content on my site. In this case, my subcat, Essential Oils, appears in 3 categories, and unfortunately, there is no Canonical URL field in said subcat area similar to what exists in the product seo settings. Any thoughts / ideas on this? I know I can assign the same custom file names to each one, but I don't believe that changes the fact that there would still be 3 different essential oil subcats in 3d's database eyes, and I don't want to redirect them so as to negate proper breadcrumb navigation if that is how my customers navigate. Any / all assistance would be great. Andrew

I was also wondering if it is worthwhile to pursue a new feature request on uservoice to get this added to 3d for those who have larger catalogs and this type of situation occurring.

[JoeBTI]

Misunderstood the original post...

[bzeltzer]

It's a good point. Personally, I make dummy categories, add no index metas and link them to the real one that has the products in it but if you feel that breadcrumbs are very important, even though it's not a feature, you can always manually add the code in the meta field of the category pages. It'll stick the code in the page header where it belongs.

<link rel="canonical" href="http://....." />

Duplicate category pages or slightly varied versions are probably a bad idea without the canonical.

[massagestore]

Thank you JoeBTI and bzeltzer. I appreciate your advice, and am going to just do redirects as per bzelter's recommendation. That said, I just created a uservoice submission to have this feature added, so if you go there, and click on it, it would be appreciated. I would imagine this is a quick / easy add for 3d moving forward. The title is: 'Add Canonical URL To Category Settings'. It is awaiting moderator approval as I type this, and I will provide the link once it is posted.

[massagestore]

FYI, I have created the User Voice entry for this feature here: https://3dcart.uservoice.com/forums/...egory-settings

Please go there and vote if you feel this would be valuable. Thank you, Andrew

[Pack Secure]

I posted there. Hope you get the feature you want.

[Luxlife]

Our situation is similar; categories with a lot of subcategories, many of which are several levels deep and and duplicated to place with different parents. But we don't think this is an issue; A redirected subcategory is just a link. It doesn't matter how many of these are in the 3dCart database. The search engines treat these as internal website links. We use redirects to encourage the search engines to rank the chosen categories receiving these links.

Our Google Analytics reports show most customers navigate using the back button rather than breadcrumbs. However, some do use breadcrumbs and there are problems. We will share our observations and concerns in a new post.

[massagestore]

Thank you Pack Secure! Luxlife thank you for sharing that information. It is quite interesting, and I thought a good bit on what it would be like if someone used the back button on a redirect. Technically, it would take them from whence they came, no? In my thinking, if they clicked on the redirected link from the home page, they would end up back home? If they were in a category and clicked on a redirected subcat link and hit back, they would end up back at the originating category page? This is what I wasn't 100% sure of. I can / will set up a test on my site to see how this works, and at the end of the day, I would love to see a canonical field added to categories to help reduce having to 'game' the system or do manual coding work. God only knows what google will do next, so it is probably always best to use proper seo technique.

[massagestore]

Quick update for those who are interested. Did a test with the category/subcategory redirect, and unfortunately, the breadcrumb 'issue' is definitely there. When redirected to another subcategory, the breadcrumbs from the parent category appear, so while back navigation works fine, breadcrumb navigation will not. Again, my hope is that we can build some momentum for a canonical field to be put in place in the category seo settings. Please hit up this uservoice post and upvote: https://3dcart.uservoice.com/forums/...egory-settings

[Luxlife]

massagestore Just to be clear, we agree, it is a good idea to show the breadcrumb according to the product's current category. The previous post was an attempt to allay concerns about having the multiples of the same categories in the database and to share what we noticed about how customers tend to navigate on our web site.