There are a lot of e-commerce platforms, these days, which can make navigating the waters of choice a hazardous business. At a later date, I may well follow this blog with a ‘what to look for in an e-commerce platform’ (I’ll work on that title, trust me) type post, but for now I wanted to point out an issue that seems to effect a number of platforms, and that’s potentially quite damaging from a search engine optimisation perspective, if less so from a usability one.
Let’s start by picking an e-commerce website. I’m going to use the URL http://www.buymenow.com/ (aside – how is this domain name still available? Somebody buy it up, quick) as a non real example.
Now, search for a product. I’m going to search for cake, as I like cake. The URL of the search return will be something like: www.buymenow.com/cake, if it’s been optimised, or something uglier if it hasn’t (I’m assuming that the site sells cake, now. And why wouldn’t it?). Now, click on the ‘next’, or ‘page2’ link to go to the second page of returns. The URL will now be www.buymenow.com/cake.html?p=2, which is fine.
Here’s the clincher, though. Click on the ‘1’ – not the back button, but the page one button. Rather than the original URL, you could well now see something like http://buymenow.com/cake.html?p=1 – a different URL, but with the same content.
Clearly, we’ve got some duplicated content here, and not even of your own creation.
The good news is that now you’re cogniscent of the issue, there are ways to fix it. The best way is to put in permanent redirects (there’s a vertical leap blog on optimising URLs) using the 301 redirect command. Some e-commerce platforms, for one reason or another, won’t let you do this; remember, though, that webmaster tools can always be of help, even if it’s more of a workaround than a permanent solution.
I’m only scraping the surface here, with this blog – I’m interested to hear feedback on your experiences of how to handle this, or similar canonical issues caused by e-commerce platforms.
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