Help: One Product in many categories

[Ashley]

Please can someone more experienced than me tell me how BP handles a product which is in more than one category.

Say we have a product in two categories, it produces two urls depending on the category eg

www.domain.com/firstcatgory/product1.html
www.domain.com/secondcatgory/product1.html

(Note the first url is the only one to appear in the sitemap)

In our site the two categories use different templates which are branded quite differently. How do I determine the following:

1. Which category is returned when doing a site search for this product?
2. Which category is indexed by Google for this product?
3. Which category goes into Google base?

Ideally I need different results for 1 and 2&3.

Hope that makes sense. Any help is appreciated.

Regards, Ashley.

[Dave]

Bluepark uses a canonical command to tell search engines to always list the first category url the product appears in. This in theory should stop duplicate pages from being listed. If you look at the source code for the product in the second category it will show a line of code pointing back to the url of the first category ie

<link rel="canonical" href="http://domain.com/firstcategory/product1.html">

So in answer to the other questions
1. First category is returned when doing a site search
2. First category should always be indexed for this product
3. First category goes into google base

[Ashley]

Thanks, Dave - that's quite clever. Couple of questions:

1. By first category, I assume you mean the 'highest one in the category structure'
2. What happens if the first category is red-flagged? - Is the canonical command still present in the second category version?
3. How do I make a category, the preferred category when it is below another in the list.

To give you a bit of context, we have a number of different brands traditionally hosted on their own discrete sites, I'm looking to bring them together on one BP site. But I want to retain the brand identity. So it's important the search engines see them with this specific identity.

Regards, Ashley.

[Dave]

Hi Ashley,

1. Yes the highest level category for that product
2. If the first category is red flagged the canonical command will change to the next active/green flagged category for that product
3. Move the preferred category up in the category manager