Some information about Google (and sometimes Bing) obtained from unofficial sources here and there recently; this week answers are provided to the following questions: If each product variant has its own URL, does a canonical link need to be given to the group URL?

Goossip #1

Multi-Page Sites: Attention to Canonical URLs

On LinkedIn, SEO Consultant Rowan Collins exchanged views with John Mueller on a specific topic regarding e-commerce structured data. In a multi-page site, since each product variant has its own URL, it should not be reduced to a single group canonical URL, as there is no single canonical URL representing the entire ProductGroup.

In practice, Google's official documents state that there is no single canonical URL for the ProductGroup on multi-page sites; because variants are spread across separate and equivalent pages. It is also emphasized that the URL property should generally be used for single-page sites and should not be used in the same way for multi-page sites.

The thought conveyed by John Mueller is that in a multi-page site, a single variant for the group should not be chosen as the "canonical version": each variant page should maintain its own URL, and tagging should connect these variants through ProductGroup / hasVariant. This serves the logic that each Product or variant's URL belongs to its own page, rather than collecting all variants on a single page.

Trust Rate: ⭐⭐⭐ We agree!

This approach is quite logical. It is better to allow each multi-page variant to exist as a legitimate URL rather than artificially trying to merge it into a single variant. This reduces the risk of sending conflicting signals to Google between product tags and HTML canonicals.

On the other hand, it is important to distinguish between the logic of structured data and the logic of duplicate pages: If two URLs are really almost identical and there is no strong editorial intent for them to be indexed separately, a HTML canonical may be appropriate on a case-by-case basis. Google's documents remind that rel=canonical is a strong signal to indicate the preferred version of a page.