Magento – an open source ecommerce platform for shopping cart websites with SEO friendly features. Lot of developers support Magento as it allows more flexibility and clean code compared to any other ecommerce platforms.
It is common in shopping cart websites when we have same products listed under multiple categories that will result in multiple pages with same product description. In the page Google addressing ‘duplicate content’ issue, they have mentioned such duplication as non-malicious. But that doesn’t mean that having them will not affect your search engines rankings.
From the features page, these are the SEO advantages they offer:
- 100% Search Engine Friendly
- Google Site Map
- URL Rewrites give full control of URL’s
- Meta-information for products and categories
- Auto-generated Site Map for display on site
- Auto-Generated Popular Search Terms Page
In Magento, 'duplicate content' issue occurs when we have “Use categories path for product URLs” option as “On” under System>>Configuration>>Catalog>>Search Engine Optimizations. Suppose I have a product listed inside three different categories, the Magento system will generate four pages with the same Product details.
- /product.html
- /category1/product.html
- /category2/product.html
- /category3/product.html
Think about a situation where a website has more than hundred products and at least a 20% of them are assigned under more than one category.
What will happen if we turn off that category path URL option?
This will ensure all the product pages will be shown independently instead of showing under a category folder. But this can highly affect user experience, difficulty in recognizing which product under which category. It will mess up the breadcrumbs. Also we will be losing an opportunity to make use of category name keywords in URLs.
