Canonical URLs and breadcrumbs
ShopWired automatically sets a rel="canonical" link element on every page of your website.
The use of the is particularly relevant for your website's category and product pages because, by default, they can appear at different URLs depending on the navigation path that a visitor to your website (or search engine bot like Googlebot) takes to arrive at the page.
All pages of your website, including category and product pages, have a base URL, which is the URL that you set when creating it, e.g.
https://www.yourdomain.com/product-url
If a visitor (or search engine) arrives at the product page by first visiting a category, the URL might look something like
https://www.yourdomain.com/category-url/product-url
or
https://www.yourdomain.com/brand-url/product-url
By setting a canonical link element on pages, ShopWired tells search engines like Google what URL to use when indexing the page in search results and prevents any penalties.
The practice of setting canonical link elements on pages is in line with Google recommendations and cannot be disabled in ShopWired.
Breadcrumbs and URL structure
Breadcrumbs and URL structure
When displaying on your website, ShopWired uses the navigation path taken by a visitor to create them.
Some ShopWired users prefer not to display products and categories at different URLs and instead want to display them always at their base URL.
ShopWired recommends that you do not change the setting below from its default state of no. However, if you prefer to do so:
- Navigate to Website settings > Domain name
- Locate the Canonical URLs section
- Locate the setting Always display product and category website pages at their canonical URLs
- Select
yes
Parameterized & duplicate URLs and crawl budget
Parameterized & duplicate URLs and crawl budget
ShopWired websites can generate many different URLs that display the same content because products and categories may appear under multiple category paths and products can also generate parameterised variation URLs. As a result, search engines may discover a very large number of URLs even though only the canonical versions are indexed.
ShopWired automatically prevents duplicate content issues by applying canonical tags at the platform level, ensuring search engines treat one URL as the primary version while ignoring duplicates.
These duplicate URLs commonly appear in Google Search Console as “Alternate page with proper canonical tag”, which indicates that canonicalisation is working correctly. Crawl budget only becomes a concern if very large numbers of unnecessary URLs cause search engines to spend excessive time crawling duplicates instead of important pages, in which case crawl waste can be reduced by managing parameterised URLs through robots.txt rules while leaving canonical tags to handle indexing signals. Read more.
