Canonical URLs on Product Variations

@lcm404

We assumed that you are concerned with duplicate content issues that occurred with WooCommmerce products. We would like to confirm this technically, therefore, could you please show us some example URLs where the issue occurs so that we can take a look at them?

Nah I can’t share links on this site. My boss will kill me. Its pretty standard though having been in eCommerce for a long time. Yes, I am concerned with duplicate content. I could think of dozens of examples though in addition to the ones I have already given. Pretty much anything sold by weight the description is going to be the same. Most electronic accessories that come in different sizes have the same descriptions. The same goes for rugs and other furniture items. This is a very big deal actually and would cause problems on some large sites if they didn’t handle this.

@lcm404 Thanks for the additional information. I hope you would get an answer to your question from this Ask Yoast Knowlege Base section where optimization of category and product pages of the online shop and avoid duplicate content issue has been discussed.

This doesn’t really offer a solution vs. just a general explanation.

This feels like its being to lightly and some of the recommendations in the link provided don’t work for many sites. I have almost 200k products with variations that have same product description. Without canonicals, it would be a mess.

Any idea on how to resolve this?

related:

Do canonical URLs have to be placed manually within each product page or is there some automated addition of the canonical tags?

Hi,

Your question is a bit outside the scope of the support we provide. Giving?SEO advice, in most cases, requires a deep analysis of your site to provide accurate advice for your specific setup, even for what may seem to be a simple question.

At Yoast, we want to help people improve their site and to make SEO attainable for everyone. So we offer?Yoast Academy?courses which are included in our Yoast SEO Premium subscription, several great plugins, and a?comprehensive SEO blog.

We recommend you check out the documentation from WooCommerce regarding variable products — https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/variable-product/

In most cases, you don’t need to modify the canonical URL field in the Yoast SEO meta box for your products. You can check out our article here for more information — https://yoast.com/help/canonical-urls-in-wordpress-seo/

I am not at all asking for SEO advice? I just asked if, in your plugin, Canonical URLs are automatically placed on the page (because I do not see them).

My only other question was in direct regards to how your plugin works with – or if it works with – WooCommerce Product Variables. That is all.

I don’t need SEO advice on this topic. This topic is a solved problem in eCommerce and the solution is that unless the content is different then canonicals should be used. If they are not, like in the case of many Amazon products, then you should not. Pretty much exactly what Google recommends (partly making it a solved problem).

Sorry if I wasn’t clear on the fact that I was only asking about features within the Yoast. When I read that this thing supported WooCommerce I figured it would account for this very common scenario.

I will add that it seems like this is as simple as a setting for “Use Canonicals on Product Variables” and if you want to override it then you have to do it manually. This would probably be the easiest solution.

Hi,

For variable products, if you leave the canonical field in Yoast SEO when editing that product, we would expect that it wouldn’t cause any duplicate content issues. For a variable product URL with the attribute filter/variation (e.g. https://website.com/product/?attribute_pa_color=blue), we would expect that the canonical would automatically go to https://website.com/product/ (based also on the canonical URL functional specification documentation), so there wouldn’t be any duplicate content issues.

Just to clarify, are you having an issue where one of your product URLs with the variation string isn’t outputting the canonical URL field when checking the page source?

“Just to clarify, are you having an issue where one of your product URLs with the variation string isn’t outputting the canonical URL field when checking the page source?”

— Yes, this is exactly what I am seeing. Looking into a possible cause but please let me know if you can shed some light.

Hi,

That is odd. We would expected a product variation page to show the canonical and the canonical of it should go back to the product page itself. See image: https://ibb.co/tsdxjb1.

If that is not happening, we would like some more information.

1. Can you confirm you are using WordPress 5.6.2? You can check by clicking on the W in the top left and selecting About. If you need to update, please check with your host provider.?Please know that if you are using an older version of WordPress Core you may experience unexpected behavior with Yoast.?This guide explains more:?https://yoast.com/why-we-dont-support-old-wordpress-versions/.

2. Are all your non-Yoast plugins and themes also updated?

3. We had another recent release. Can you confirm you are using the most recent Yoast SEO, v15.9? If you update, does the issue resolve?

4. Does clearing your caching from your theme, plugin, server, CDN like CloudFlare or browser resolve the issue? If you are not sure how to clear caching from theme/plugin please speak to those authors. If you want to clear cache from the server, please speak to your host provider. To clear the cache from a browser use this guide: https://yoast.com/help/how-to-clear-my-browsers-cache/

going to test and post back. thanks for the advice.

Hi,

Please do let us know if you are able to report your findings and if you are able to resolve the issue with the canonical URL with the product variations.

We are going ahead and marking this issue as resolved due to inactivity. If you require any further assistance please create a new issue.

Please don’t. I needed to update everything on my site to confirm that wasn’t the issue. I have updated everything including Yoast and can confirm that on my end there are no canonical tags on variation pages that point to the main URL for the product.

Any ideas what may be causing this?