I help out with FRQ, a marketplace where shoppers find local clothing shops nearby and shop owners list their stock for free. Our Search Console export for 28 Sep to 27 Oct 2026 shows 6,886 impressions and 86 clicks across the site. The most useful finding was not a keyword. It was that the same product could be reached at two addresses, and Google indexed both.
The setup
Each product has a page on the main domain, frq.in/product/X, and a page on the shop's own subdomain, <shop>.frq.in/product/X. The main page already set its canonical tag to the subdomain, so the design was sound on paper. A canonical tag is only a hint, though, and Google does not always follow it.
What the export showed
| Page type | URLs | Clicks | Impressions | CTR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Product pages on the main domain | 220 | 5 | 839 | 0.6% |
| Product pages on shop subdomains | 123 | 2 | 293 | 0.7% |
Between them, 343 of the 528 indexed URLs are product pages. They got 1,132 impressions and 7 clicks. The blog posts, by comparison, had 5,945 impressions and 55 clicks, so the product pages were taking space in the results without earning visits.
One product page was reachable at three addresses: the main domain, a shop subdomain and the www host.
Product snippets were rare but telling: 24 impressions, at an average position of 16.5. The pages were there, but the snippet was not doing much.
Other things the export turned up
- Fourteen test URLs were indexed (test shops, test products, a /store/test page). Those need
noindexor deletion, because they compete with real pages. - Mobile averaged position 7.1 and desktop 13.4. A page that looks fine on a laptop can still be hard to use on a phone, and 87% of our impressions are on mobile.
- Google showed 1,927 'translated results' (28% of impressions) at a 0.5% CTR. Hindi searchers were seeing machine-translated pages, not ours.
The fix we are asking for
- Pick one address per product. Either
frq.in/product/Xor<shop>.frq.in/product/X. - Send the other address to the chosen one with a 301, which is a stronger signal than a canonical hint.
- Add Product schema with price and availability, so a snippet has something real to show.
- Remove the city from the product description template. It was repeated on every product page.
- Submit the sitemap again, and request indexing for the edited pages.
Why this matters beyond our site
A marketplace grows by adding sellers, and each seller brings a subdomain. If your product URL depends on the seller's subdomain, every new seller creates a new duplicate, and search engines split the signal between them. Decide the canonical address before the first hundred sellers, not after.
Our numbers are small, so treat them as a pattern to check rather than a benchmark. The Search Console export is the thing to look at on your own site: the page-type table takes about ten minutes to build.
(I help out with FRQ.)
