X-Cart 5 and duplicate content...
 

I'm in the middle of migration from XC 4.6 to 5.2 and have noticed a curious thing.

Make a category: Widgets

Make a subcategory: Blue Widgets

Make a Product: "Small blue widget".

Products URL becomes: www.widgets4u/small-blue-widget.html

That product is placed under two categories, the Widget and also the Blue Widget category.

However, if you go into the cart as a customer and navigate to the Widgets category and see the product, it's URL becomes: www.widgets4u/widgets/small-blue-widget.html

If you go to the subcategory "Blue Widgets" and see the product, it's URL becomes: www.widgets4u/widgets/blue-widgets/small-blue-widget.html

So the same product here has 3 different URL's, a major penalization for duplicate content on Google. I opened up a ticket and the tech told me since I put the same product under 2 categories, both URL's are valid. Now I know for sure XC 4.6 is not like that. Each product should have ONE URL for it. In 4.6, no matter which category or subcategory, that URL is the same. Sometimes products belong under more than one category.

Likewise, the "Blue Widgets" sub-category has this URL: www.widgets4u/widgets/blue-widgets

The "widgets" should not be inserted in that URL, it should just be www.widgets4u/blue-widgets

Could someone else please confirm this is correct? Because if this is the way XC5 is, I'm not upgrading! Why is this thing making all these sub-directories?

Re: X-Cart 5 and duplicate content...
 

Since X-Cart 5 adds the "Canonical URL" meta tag, the duplicate content is not a problem there: Google and other search engines will index only one of the available URLs and will ignore the rest.


There are users who would not agree with you :-) Actually, it was one of feature requests proposed for X-Cart 4.

"Blue-widgets" is a subcategory of "widgets" category, and the full trail to the subcategory is included into the URL. You can remove the "blue-widgets" part from the URL and get into the "widgets" category immediately.

The same goes for product: you can navigate to a product page from two different categories, that's why it changes the full trail depending on where you come from (breadcrumbs change the same way). Unless it affects SEO (that is not the case) I don't see a problem in having a product available at multiple URLs.

Re: X-Cart 5 and duplicate content...
 

URL + a different canonical sends mixed signals to Google and it's not certain that all link juice is passed. Studies by MOZ suggest it's between 90 and 99% but not 100% and would be negatively impacting results.

It is a problem for statistic tracking, analytics and funnel tracking as it breaks up stats over multiple variations.

What happens to the URL when the category gets disabled or the product is moved out of the category. Does it 404?

It makes it much more difficult to track links over the internet.

There are many more problems.

If you are using a canonical link it only makes sense to use the single URL format and be certain to consolidate the link juice.

I wouldn't run a site or client site under a mixed URL structure. It's not at all clean.

Re: X-Cart 5 and duplicate content...
 

I agree with Jon,
I think the addition of category based URLs is a nice feature. It helps the site read like a tree rather than a plain of grass. But I think the main category should be used for the URL. It may get confusing to visitors if they are paying attention to the URL, and I know it is hard to do because of the way this was designed, but I think it is for the best if this change was implemented.

Re: X-Cart 5 and duplicate content...
 

It's fine to give the option have having category based URLS so an option of:

https://www.example.com/product.html
OR
https://www.example.com/main-category/product.html

But https://www.example.com/category1/product.html, https://www.example.com/category2/product.html, https://www.example.com/category3/product.html is just poor design and practice IMO.

Re: X-Cart 5 and duplicate content...
 

Jon, thanks a lot for the insight. I will talk to the team about possible improvements of SEO-friendly URLs.

Re: X-Cart 5 and duplicate content...
 

Jon, yes, now if a product is removed, the page will return 404. I feel, you would disagree with that. How should it work in your opinion?

Re: X-Cart 5 and duplicate content...
 

The product shouldn't be in multiple categories so it shouldn't be an issue. Product should have one URL. Any time that URL changes for any reason a 301 redirect should be automatically created from old url to new.

Re: X-Cart 5 and duplicate content...
 

I agree with you in that. I was asking more about what if you remove a product from the catalog at all. I believe, in this case the page should return 404.

Re: X-Cart 5 and duplicate content...
 

Just to be clear. This is exactly how it works in X-Cart 4/5 at the moment.