Help regarding category-hierarchy in webshop

[I Will Make It]

Hi all!

I have some trouble setting up my categories the right way.

My shop sell decorations for all sort of parties.
Wedding, child christenings, birthdays, confirmations, gardenparty and so on..

A lot of my products would fit in many of the categories.

In order to make the customer feel like s/he has found THE right webshop for the occasion, I need to give brides a category named: "Wedding decorations".

A mum who is celebrating the 1st birthday for her son, wants to click "Birthday decorations"

And he who is planning a gardenparty, want to click on "Garden party accessories"

And so on.. I don't want a "general decorations" category, I am pretty sure this will hurt my sales.

The problem would then be "Duplicate content".

Because what I'd really want to do is the following:

Wedding decorations
- Balloons
- Table cloths
- Candle lights
- Rose petals

Confirmation decorations
- Balloons
- Table cloths
- Candle lights
- Rose petals

Birthday decorations
- Balloons
- Table cloths
- Candle lights
- Rose petals

And so on.. in other words, many alike subcategories under the main categories.

And all these categories will contain lots of the same products, even though there WILL be some different products here and there.

Is there a way around this, or would google be OK with the fact that my products are presented in many categories, which also has pretty much the same names?

Any suggestions are appreciated :)

[goodroi]

What about using noindex to handle the duplicate content?

[netmeg]

The product pages need to use rel=canonical to the actual product URL (without categories in the URL). Then you can put them in as many categories and sub categories as you want - Google is used to this.

Copying categories can be more problematic. What I do is map everything out in a spreadsheet or some other program, and then methodically go through my entire layout to determine which categories are likely to be dupes or near dupes. (Anything 60% or more the same is a dupe in my book) Then I NOINDEX any subcats that are too similar to others. If the site has been up for a while, I will go check to see which categories are ranking first leave the best ranking subcat indexed.

[I Will Make It]

@goodroi - Thank you for your reply, I could of course do that, but then I would have to no-index almost an entire category, and I don't know if that would be any good either - then it definately won't show up in the searches.

@netmeg - So what you are saying is that the product-url should not contain anything about the category?

So instead of
www.page.com/category-1/product1.html
www.page.oom/category-2/product1.html

it should just be:
www.page.com/product1.html ?

Edit:
And this is just for the URL's.
Can the breadcrumbs read e.g:
You are here: Category 1 -> product 1
and
You are here: Category 2 -> product 1

Or should I avoid this too?

[JD_Toims]

Canonical will keep all but one of each version of the page from being indexed the same as noindex will. I'd go with alternates.

EG on /category-1/product1.html:
<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.example.com/category-2/product1.html">

[netmeg]

So instead of
www.page.com/category-1/product1.html
www.page.oom/category-2/product1.html

it should just be:
www.page.com/product1.html ?

That's the way I do it, yes.

Breadcrumbs can include the categories.

JD - what's the advantage to rel=alternate there? I thought that was more an alternate language thing.

[I Will Make It]

Perfect! Thank you for your quick responses!

I settled with this kind of url for my products which are "linked" to several categories:

http:// www .mysite.com/products/product1.html

As for the categories which in fact are copied, but are named the same - I will look into noindexing the ones that are duplicates :)

[JD_Toims]

According to the specs rel=alternate can be used when you have different versions/representations of an essentially the same page.

Gives alternate representations of the current document.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/links.html#rel-alternate

The biggest difference I know of between an alternate and canonical is with alternate you tell SEs "Hey, I know these are essentially the same, so decide which one fits the query best", rather than with canonical where you say, "Hey, I know these are essentially the same, so only use [this one]".

Basically, I try to tell them I know there are two essentially the same pages, but it's up to them to decide how to handle it, rather than telling them there are two essentially the same pages and I want them to use Version B for all related queries.

[I Will Make It]

@JD_Toims:
But would rel=altenate, or canonical be necessary if the product-link is the exact same for all categories, or are you thinking what I can do with the categories?

Because as far as I can understand, if you have the same link to something - e.g. a productpage, this must be the same as if you link to the same blogpost from other internal blogposts.

But on the categories-pages, this makes a lot of sence!
How can I set rel=alternate on some of the categories, anyone familiar with Prestashop 1.5.x.x that knows?

[JD_Toims]

If the product page is the same and you just link to it from different pages, you shouldn't need an alternate or canonical, but I almost always run a canonical on all pages, just because it doesn't hurt and can help with the "lazy scraper" who steals a page and forgets to change it.