Amazon Canonical URL and its Issues

Canonical comes from the work canonicalization, which refers to the process of picking the best authoritative uniform resource locator amongst many multiple options. Canonical URL is the authoritative URL that you would like the browser to treat with the best authority, in other words, it the webpage that you would like the user to visit with priority. For example, let’s take the case of the URL below:

www.school.com

school.com

www.school.com/index.htm

Most people will treat this website the same. But the fact is that from a search engine perspective these are all different URLs. The best way to let the search engine know which is the preferred URL is to canonicalize the URL and give the search engine authority to prioritize them upon user requests. It had been noted in the past of some sites have up to twenty versions of the same content of the webpage but with different uniform resource locators. The simplest solution to this scenario is to have one common link that would direct the users to this common webpage, hence this is the whole concept behind the canonicalization of uniform resource locators (URL). This canonical concept could be best referred to as “Belonging to” or “relating to” or reducing to the most significant form.

The above concept of canonicalization of webpages is very important on the internet of commerce websites such as Alibaba.com, Amazon.com, ebay.com, Olx.com, and many more internet commerce websites.

What is the Amazon Canonical URL issue?

Let zero down mainly to amazon.com: A dynamic URL is a link that keeps on changing continuously with time, a static URL is a link that is static and rigid with the change of time. URL that is not authoritative to the search engine i.e not canonicalized doesn’t contain the actual information about any items description of the product, for amazon, this is usually not a problem, it has characters that usually identify parameters, often the language (UTF8), are offering domain (ref=), session or user ID. It is noticed however that it continuously changes slightly every other time you engage the search engine in its job of browsing, These concepts of referring to products with their descriptions, reviews and every other thing people bought enables amazon to be continuously spidered because there is an endless in-depth in its webpages.

An example scenario in amazon: Let’s take the following URL link for demonstration live how the concept of canonicalization could be applicable in amazon:

http://amazon.com/BalanceFrom-All-purpose-Anti-Tear exercise carrying/dp/Bp/B00F09ZR

Amazon disallows the search engine to recognize that these webpages are the same and are leading to the common webpage destination, this enables Amazon to decide which URL to rank for keyword search. This is where the concept of canonical URL where the search engine in amazon recognizes all these links leads to the same page but they are given authority to lead to the said webpage link at once for search engine organizational purposes. Let’s return to the scenario above:

If we check out the source code,

Of the canonical URL this way:

View-source: www.amazon.com/BalanceFrom-all –Purpose-Tear-Exercise-Carrying/dp/B00FO9ZRZ/,

If you view web search for the word canonical web for the above you will find the following canonical URL:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.amazon.com/BalnceFromAllpurposeAntiTear Exercise.

The listing title for the product above on amazon is as follows:

BalanceFromGoYogaAll Purpose1/2-inchExtra Thick High-Density Anti Tear Yoga Mat With Carrying Strap.

If you look keenly you will notice that amazon pulls words from there to create the canonical URL.

Use canonical URLs when posting links to your products on amazon so that viewers get it easy to access them.