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We have a store with around 80000tsd Products. All of them are linked to about 2tsd parent products. I was wondering, if it would be a good idea to set the canonical tag of the simple products to their respective parent product. We are using Simple Configurable Products by the way.

Has anyone any experience with that? Especially concerning Google Rankings!

For the technical part I would have used something like

Mage::getModel('catalog/product_type_configurable')
    ->getParentIdsByChild($_product->getId());

to get the ID and then load the product to get the URL. I could imagine there could be a more efficient way? Any thoughts?

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Actually there isn't. Well apart from creating a separate product attribute where you manually fill in the parents ID. But just for the sake of argument, why show the simple product in the catalog when you already have it under a configurable product?

With the canonical tag it holds very little value for Google so you might as well set visibility to hidden

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  • We have several thousand screws in different sizes and some people are looking for a particular size so it's important to have the simple products ranked. I actually implemented this change and so far rankings are unfortunately decreasing.The idea behind all this is to give google some sort of order which pages are more important than others. Sometimes we have two pages ranked for the same keywords but not on the first page of results. It'd be obviously more beneficial if we had only one page in the results but with a better ranking. We also use rel-prev and rel-next
    – kilsen
    Commented Nov 30, 2014 at 16:06
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If someone is thinking about the same idea. In our case, google begun de-indexing the pages pointing to the master product. The master article did rank for the keyword including the variation (in our case different sizes) but noticeably worse. The master-page did rank better though for the keyword without the size, in our case we still lost nearly 20% traffic as we have far more simple products than simple products, so think twice before doing this.

Give you an example: Red T-Shirt (Master) Red T-Shirt Size L (Simple)

Ranking for "Red T-Shirt" improved, Ranking for "Red T-Shirt Size L" got worse after changing the Canonical.

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