Automatic canonical tag creation in newest version product cards 
Author: John W.I am just curious, I have not uploaded to the newest update yet, but I did read through the change logs. It says in version upgrade 2021.2.3 that canonical tags will be created automatically for the product cart entries.
So four questions:
a) I know where the canonical tag goes, and I understand this means a static webpage URL is being created. Does the URL for the canonical tag automatically get added into the sitemap.xml file? Or will there be an option like with regular pages to ask it to exclude if you wanted it to? I would think that if all these additional URL's are going to be created, it will give you a huge boost with Google when it recognizes all these new pages added. And if only the cart info is on a page, should be very fast loading pages making the mobile crowd happy too. A plus for user experience.
b) Related to the above question. If the new URL is created. An entry goes in the sitemap file. Search Consule finds and indexes the page. But then a product becomes discontinued. You remove it or do not include it any more on any page in your website. What happens in sitemap.xml, Google Search Counsule, and in regard to broken links?
Thus, if you remove a product and its URL was indexed, will we now have to jump into our .htaccess file and tell it of the 301 redirect to another product or a fair substitute, or Sorry Charlie, ya ain't gonna get it.
Before I dive into this new product card creating a URL for everything page, just wondering what work could be involved as products become discontinued.
c) Is the program creating a separate page for every product card you create, or only active cards on established pages? And then, if you list the same product card on multiple pages, for example, I have LED power drivers that work with various lights, so I drop the driver product card on several pages for ease of use to the user. Will it create duplicate canonical tags and URLS's.
d) How does the consumer get to these pages? What part of the product card is automatically becoming a link to these pages? Right now, I have many multiple images on my cards. Click the picture, a menu appears with thumbnails of other pictures to view. So what will become the defualt linking criteria that brings people to the product card pages?
Thanks. I hope someone has the technical answers to the above.
Add on to John's questions:
Does the root cart now have a canonical? It didn't used to. (//(url)/cart/index.html)
And to go along, the previous version of the cart also does not have a meta description - has this been updated?
Adrian
Also: the old cart index.html does not have an h1 heading. Does the new one?
Author
Yeah, SEMRUSH likes complaining about that missing H1 on the cart index page. Which overall is not a big deal. We are not optimizing the cart index page for search engines. It is a tool, not a promo page. Google should be smart enough not to penalize the page in any way. And even if they did, it is not an entrance page to a website. My biggest concern would be new URL's that go away when a product is obsolete. Could lead to a lot of broken links with out 301 redirects.
Good afternoon
I'll try to address every question one by one:
a) As of now, the pages for every product do not end up in the sitemap. Considering the benefit this could bring, I confirm that the matter is currently under discussion by the developers
b) due to the first answer, I cannot answer this right now
c) A single page is built dynamically to host every product page, just like the blog. You won't get a single file per product page
d) Your product will automatically link to the product page by clicking the title or the image according to how you configured the Product Catalog Object. Plus, you can also automatically create links to a specific product with the default Link functionality in the software to create a link just like you did before for normal pages and resources
e) The cart doesn't have a canonical link still, same with the cartsearch, but is being discussed as well.
I remain available in case of further questions
Stefano
Author
Thanks, Stefano. If the URL's are dynamically created, that might eliminate the need for 301 redirects unless someone specifically links to the dynamic URL. I do this with my blog posts. I add them onto my sitemap.html page which is like a glossary or index in the site for users to see. And then every blog post I create, I add it manually into a sitemap.xml file, but it is a second file. This file I store on the site as /blog/sitemap.xml. I have it listed in Google Search Consule, and Google take a look at it every few weeks. So anytime I create a new blog post, I update it in that file, and with a hard link on the website on the sitemap.html page. And when it is related to a product, I try to put a link to the blog post on a product page. Just to make it look a spec more important to Google - in which it is. They are designed to help the customers with more info.
So if the URL's remain constant such as mysite.com/products?the-name-of-my-product-here123 just like the blog does, links can be set up to those pages from external sites and forums. Which could result in a lot of 404's if something is erased due to it becoming obsolete. Guess we should expect that a 301 redirect will be needed. Or, we leave the page in tact with a note on it about "go here for the updated product substitute." Difficulty there though, old page has a canonical to itself. If the canonical could revert to the new page, it would most certainly please Google informing it not to index the old page any more.
Think you guys got some work ahead of you with this one. Blog posts can stay there forever and get buried deep and ignored in time. But products change. They come and go. We will need a system to avoid the 404 errors, possibly automatic 301 redirect entries in the .htaccess file, and give the program the power to erase a page from the server when a product is listed as gone???
You should look into an override for the canonical tag in blogs too, especially as it relates to guest blogging. I have gotten a couple of requests to repost blogs on my site. But the program automatically creates that canonical tag. If I could put in a manual tag like on normal web pages and point it to the domain in which the blog is the property of, it would avoid a duplicate content problem. (I like the automatic canonical tag thing, but sometimes we should have some controll over it with an override.)
Hello John
Your analysis of the problem is indeed very helpful. I've informed the developers of all that has been said here so that, when discussing improvements on this functionality, all of this can be kept under consideration so that a proper update can be performed
As soon as news on this front becomes available, it will be made known through the community or via update as to keep everyone up to speed
Thank you for your useful feedback
Stefano
Author
Thanks, Stefano.