Duplicate Product Pages

Hello guys,

I am working on a Magento 2 website that has got thousands of duplicate product pages.

The products are in multiple categories with different URLs for each product - for example, domain.com/category-1/sub-category-1/product and domain.com/category-2/sub-category-2/product - there are no canonicals in place for 95% of the pages.

They want to keep the URL structure so I am going to be canonicalising each of them to the product-level URL (domain.com/product).

As the categories are going to have links to the non-canonical URL, is this likely to have a long-term impact on link equity across the website? Would it be beneficial to push to test having direct links to the product level URLs from some of the categories to demonstrate that this will likely have a positive impact in the medium term?

Francis Begbie said:

is this likely to have a long-term impact on link equity across the website?

Click to expand...

I was just about to say that canonical tags don't affect link equity, but I decided to google it before giving a (wrong) answer and I just found a blog post from Cognitive SEO saying that they do affect it, so I'm not sure what to think now.... Better wait for other people's opinions as my SEO knowledge (the technical SEO knowledge I mean) is limited apparently...

Francis Begbie said:

Would it be beneficial to push to test having direct links to the product level URLs from some of the categories to demonstrate that this will likely have a positive impact in the medium term?

Click to expand...

Testing is an important part of SEO, so do it if you have products that are not ranked and don't get traffic and sales yet, there's nothing to lose if you test on those products. But what kind of "positive impact" are you hoping to see? And what does the medium term even mean in this context? 6 months, or?

tazarbm said:

I was just about to say that canonical tags don't affect link equity, but I decided to google it before giving a (wrong) answer and I just found a blog post from Cognitive SEO saying that they do affect it, so I'm not sure what to think now.... Better wait for other people's opinions as my SEO knowledge (the technical SEO knowledge I mean) is limited apparently...


Testing is an important part of SEO, so do it if you have products that are not ranked and don't get traffic and sales yet, there's nothing to lose if you test on those products. But what kind of "positive impact" are you hoping to see? And what does the medium term even mean in this context? 6 months, or?

Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply.

The problem is that there’s such widespread cannibalisation that it’s heavily impacting product page visibility, and IMO, how Google views the website overall.

For the equity, if all of the categories are populated by product URLs that are canonicalised to other URLs I don’t see how this will pass it on - canonicals don’t pass it on, as far as i know - but happy to be corrected.

Francis Begbie said:

The problem is that there’s such widespread cannibalisation that it’s heavily impacting product page visibility, and IMO, how Google views the website overall.

Click to expand...

if there's a lot of cannibalisation then the site's structure is wrong, so you need to make this info known to the site owners or else there's little you can do to help them. If they want rankings they need to re-structure (and possibly do some 301 redirects, as well, to keep the rankings of the URLs that already rank) the site.

This looks like an insane amount of work to be honest, they'd better pay you handsomely for this.

Francis Begbie said:

For the equity, if all of the categories are populated by product URLs that are canonicalised to other URLs I don’t see how this will pass it on - canonical don’t pass it on, ad far as i know

Click to expand...

that's exactly what I thought, too before googling the answer for good measure, but now I'm not sure what to think until I test it myself.

Anyway, I've never owned an ecom site, so my knowledge is limited unfortunately so I'll stop here with the replies. Let's hope that someone else can help you better