shags38
Junior Member
- Apr 3, 2019
- 196
- 25
I have an eCommerce site with about 300 products. I loaded most of these products into a general "all products" category then linked each product to other categories that they would fall into using an internal category linking program.
I use a url 'rewrite plugin' to rewrite the platforms dynamic url's to 'user friendly' url's. Intial generation of the rewritten url's creates the canonical url to the category used for the initial product creation.
Subsequently changing 'master category' DOES NOT change the original canonical url (a regrettable flaw in the plugin). Needless to say I wasn't aware of this lack of functionality when I began using the program.
QUESTION: does Google use the canonical url for ranking? e.g. domain/categoryA/product is the canonical however the product is better suited for /categoryB/ (it is 'linked' to that category) and that is where I would like Google to attribute its ranking, i.e. /categoryA/ is not a search term ("all products") but /categoryB/ has high search volume.
OR ... will Google still attribute its 'ranking' to a category specific url by its cPath - so using the above example /categoryB/product?cPath=xxx - this is hoping in hope because the url in the sitemap is the canonical, right?
If the former is true then with 300 products the number of redirects I would need to add to .htaccess would be in the vicinity of 1200 (on average each product is linked to 4 different categories) - not only will that take me an enormous amount of time I would think that this would slow the site down considerably.
If I am forced to do this massive number of redirects does anyone have a solution other than clogging up the .htaccess ??
I use a url 'rewrite plugin' to rewrite the platforms dynamic url's to 'user friendly' url's. Intial generation of the rewritten url's creates the canonical url to the category used for the initial product creation.
Subsequently changing 'master category' DOES NOT change the original canonical url (a regrettable flaw in the plugin). Needless to say I wasn't aware of this lack of functionality when I began using the program.
QUESTION: does Google use the canonical url for ranking? e.g. domain/categoryA/product is the canonical however the product is better suited for /categoryB/ (it is 'linked' to that category) and that is where I would like Google to attribute its ranking, i.e. /categoryA/ is not a search term ("all products") but /categoryB/ has high search volume.
OR ... will Google still attribute its 'ranking' to a category specific url by its cPath - so using the above example /categoryB/product?cPath=xxx - this is hoping in hope because the url in the sitemap is the canonical, right?
If the former is true then with 300 products the number of redirects I would need to add to .htaccess would be in the vicinity of 1200 (on average each product is linked to 4 different categories) - not only will that take me an enormous amount of time I would think that this would slow the site down considerably.
If I am forced to do this massive number of redirects does anyone have a solution other than clogging up the .htaccess ??