Magento Canonical

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Matt Raynes: I see a lot of this from magento built sites -
  
  www.website.com/product-category/category/product1
  
  The above is canonicalised to the below.
  
  www.website.com/product1
  
  What are your views on this approach?  ;I want the TLD version to go away and just focus on the actual product in the natural internal link path.  ;But more and more mangento sites i'm coming across have adapted to this process.
• 
  Dan B.: The best thing I did for my current employer is get their flagship product off of the Magento platform.
• 
  Martino Mosna: Magento's product permalinks works either way, with or without categories so rel canonicals are mandatory imho.
  
  I usually set them up to be consistent:
  
  1) without categories in the internal URLs (there's a specific option for this in the admin backend)
  2) with rel canonical option set on
• 
  Tony “Tiggerito” McCreath: I personally try and avoid any sort of folder based catagorising of products.
  
  What if the product changes category.
  What if the product is in multiple categories.
  What if the category moves.
• 
  Matt Raynes: So, in terms of best practise for SEO -
  Would you remove the TLD version of the page and canonical back to the naturally path'd product page or does not make any real difference so just leave the TLD version there with the naturally internally linked to page sitting there too with the canonical remaining to point at the duplicated TLD version?
• 
  Tony “Tiggerito” McCreath: What does TLD stand for? ;
  
  To canonical, you have to keep the TLD page and add a canonical tag in its html that points to the URL you want the search engines to show. What you call the naturally path'd product page (NPPP).
  
  I think a better solution would be to have those TLD pages 301 redirect to their NPPPs. 301s force the use of the correct page. They are not just a suggestion, which the canonical tag is. However it sounds like implementing 301s for this would be harder to do.
  
  You would also want all internal linking to point to the NPPPs and not the TLDs. This is to avoid them having unnecessary canonicals or redirects involved.
• 
  Matt Raynes: Thanks Tony, the better solution you offered was my recommendation too.  ;It's just that I'm coming across a lot of magento sites that seem to have this same 'issue'.  ;I just wandered if anyone else has experienced it to and how they went about handling it.
• 
  Edwin Jonk: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 01:02:58 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/magento_canonical +Matt Raynes
  
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