Setting Canonical URL on Miva Merchant Category and Product Pages

In February I covered how the search engines are taking a stab at helping website owners address duplicate content by specifying a preferred URL for each page with a canonical URL meta element and showed how to set the canonical URL for your storefront.
Today I am going to show you how to set the canonical URL in the Miva Merchant admin for product and category pages. My examples use the default 5.5 admin interface with no extra modules; if you have a template manager then you will need to make the changes inside the template manager instead of the default PROD page and CTGY page template.

Here are the steps to setup for your categories:

• Login to your store admin
• Under your store name click on Pages
• Click edit next to CTGY (search if needed)
• Locate the line: [sourcecode language=“html”]<base href="&mvt:global:basehref;">[/sourcecode]
• Paste the code below after the line above: [sourcecode language=“html”]<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=&mvta:category:code;" />[/sourcecode]

Here are the steps to setup for your products:

• Login to your store admin
• Under your store name click on Pages
• Click edit next to PROD (search if needed)
• Locate the line: [sourcecode language=“html”]<base href="&mvt:global:basehref;">[/sourcecode]
• Paste the code below after the line above: [sourcecode language=“html”]<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=&mvta:product:code;" />[/sourcecode]

You will need to update the text in href= to match your domain and the location of your merchant.mvc file. The above examples are intended for people using the default URLs in Miva Merchant; however, many sites use SEO friendly links using the SEO settings in Miva Merchant or using a module such as Ultimate SEO Links by Sebenza.

Fear not, here is how to change the canonical element to implement this trick using SEO friendly URLs:

Set Canonical URL Using SEO Short Links

[sourcecode language=“html”]
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/category/&mvta:category:code;.html" />
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product/&mvta:product:code;.html" />
[/sourcecode]

Set Canonical URL Using Sebenza SEO module for product or category codes

[sourcecode language=“html”]
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/&mvta:category:code;.html" />
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/&mvta:product:code;.html" />
[/sourcecode]

Set Canonical URL Using Sebenza SEO module for product or category names

[sourcecode language=“html”]
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/&mvta:category:name;.html" />
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/&mvta:product:name;.html" />
[/sourcecode]

In case you missed the announcement from the major search engines and don’t know what this is all about check out the announcements:

Google Announcement

Yahoo Announcement

Microsoft Announcement

Ask Announcement