Domain SEO
Depending on your category structure, the products and categories on your website can appear at multiple different URLs. For example, the ‘base’ URL of a product named 'white nike air trainers' would be:
http://www.yourdomain.com/white-nike-air-trainers
But if a visitor to your site accessed that product by going through a category page named 'white trainers' then the URL would be:
http://www.yourdomain.com/white-trainers/white-nike-air-trainers
This means that every product in your store could be available at multiple different URLs, dependent on the path that the visitor takes through category pages to reach the product. This is also true for categories which are subcategories.
The platform uses this URL structure, depending on your theme, to provide a breadcrumb trail to your website visitors. This trail gives visitors quick links back to previous pages that they were viewing, as in this example:
Within the HTML document that makes up the product page file a ‘canonical link tag’ is set. This tag tells Google, and other search engines, what the ‘preferred’ URL for the page is. This is set so that the multiple URLs that exist for the same page don’t cause problems with duplicate content which can confuse search engines. You can read more about canonical links on Google’s help guides here.
If you want your product and category pages to always appear at their ‘base’ or ‘canonical’ URL you can disable the default URL architecture. To do this select from the menu, and find the ‘Domain SEO’ section on the page:
Change the setting to ‘Yes’ and select save changes.
Once you have changed the setting product and category pages will only appear at their base URL no matter what path a visitor took to land on the page.