How are URLs set up in WebShop?
Purpose
To describe how we manage canonical category URLs in WebShop for both your customers and search engines.
Introducing terms and concepts used in this article
Term | Definition |
---|---|
Canonical URL | the best representative address of a website where a group of duplicate pages have been identified by a search engine, such as Google. |
Category | a class that contains one or more products from your product listing. |
Category tree | a hierarchy containing your product listings consisting of parent and child categories. |
Search engine optimization | (SEO), a method of attracting more organic traffic to your website (in this case, WebShop) by making it appear higher on search engine results pages. |
Uniform resource locator | (URL), the address of a website. |
More information
When structuring how you represent each product's location (i.e its URL), consider two things:
How your customers use your WebShop to find products. In particular, your customers like to be able to read the URL when they open a product category. Then they want to easily interact with the provided list to filter it in order to quickly find the product they want.
How search engines, such as Google, crawl, index and return search results. Search engine 'bots' require reliable ways to identify unique pages. Typically, each product page is easy to locate (crawl to by the 'bot'). Also, each product page has indicated how we want it to be indexed.
Balancing how humans interact and how 'bots' interact with your product pages is the key to providing both a great customer experience and search engines identifying unique pages when requested.
Key determinants that help to balance these two interactions are:
How you structure your category tree
How you configure the URLs for each category
How you configure the URLs for each product page
What is the Digital Commerce approach?
Key points
Digital Commerce provides two URL types to balance the needs of both customers (who require human-readable URLs) and search engine 'bots' (who require machine-readable URLs).
Remember to consider your category structure and URL naming conventions to improve both customer user experience and SEO.
This approach is inline with best practice and standards published by Google and other major search engine providers.
Extra external information
Since these are links to external sites, Experlogix has no control over their contents.
Consolidate duplicate URLs - linked from Google Help Center
Faceted navigation best (and 5 of the worst) practices - linked from Google Help Center