Optimize a Classifieds Site
-
Hi,
I have a classifieds website and would like to optimize it. The issues/questions I have:
-
A Classifieds site has, say, 500 cities. Is it better to create separate subdomains for each city (http://city_name.site.com) or subdirectory (http://site.com/city_name)?
-
Now in each city, there will be say 50 categories. Now these 50 categories are common across all the cities. Hence, the layout and content will be the same with difference of latest ads from each city and name of the city and the urls pointing to each category in the relevant city.
The site architecture of a classifieds site is highly prone to have major content which is not really a duplicate content. What is the best way to deal with this situation?
I have been hit by Panda in April 2011 with traffic going down 50%. However, the traffic since then has been around same level. How to best handle the duplicate content penalty in case with site like a classifieds site.
Cheers!
-
-
Thanks Dr. Peter :). I have implemented your suggestions, so will see if I get any better rankings. Meanwhile, I will continue link building effort for the site!
-
They shouldn't - a META NOINDEX is easier to undo than a Robots.txt block, 301, or canonical tag, in my experience. The biggest risk is just a delay - it may take Google a little time to re-index the content once you remove the tag.
What I wouldn't do is add/remove the tag rapidly. For example, if you had a product that went out of stock every other day, I'd leave it alone - Google wouldn't respond quickly enough to all those changes. So, once a category has enough results, I'd lift the NOINDEX permanently. It's really just a move to consolidate while you build up the site - both in terms of content and your link profile.
-
I really want to clear out thin content and your response makes it much clear to me. Now I know want to do next. Thank you so much for replying and clarifying the details.
I have another question.. Let's consider this scenario where I add META NOINDEX to the category pages that have less than 5 classified ads. Later down the road there are more than 5 ads posted in that category and I would like to put META INDEX... will google treat this page differently meaning with some penalty of NOINDEX in first place and then INDEX later on or not index these categories as they were NOINDEX earlier?
-
Unfortunately, the painful reality, especially if you've been hit by Panda, is that you probably can't support that scale or that it looks thin to Google. 500 cities X 50 categories = 25,000 "category" pages, so to speak, all of which are basically just search results. For most sites, it's just too much.
I'd definitely keep the cities as sub-folders. If you go the sub-domain route, you could fracture your internal link-juice even more. It depends a bit on the authority and marketing budget of the site. If each city is a separate property with its own sales force, budget, etc., there may be a logic to sub-domains. Unless you're Groupon or someone like that, though, it's probably a bad idea.
You may have to prune down the indexed content, to be frank. I'd look for other Panda factors, too, like aggressive ad density (too many ads to too little content) or very thin pages. If you have tons of cities or categories with no listings, META NOINDEX them. You could even do it dynamically - only let Google index a page if it has 1+ listings, for example.
I'd also take a look at other low-value content, like paginated search. If each city has 100s of pages and you're indexing page 2, page 3, etc., consider consolidating them. It's a tricky topic, but Adam Audette has a great write-up here:
http://searchengineland.com/five-step-strategy-for-solving-seo-pagination-problems-95494
These pages can look very low-value to Google. Add in search sorts and other variants, and your 25K categories could be exploding into hundreds of thousands of pages, before Google even gets to the listings themselves. The ads are the real meat of the site, and that's where you want Google to focus.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Site Speed Testing Tools For Production Sites
Hi Guys, Any free site speed testing tools for sites in production, which are password protected? We want to test site speed before the new site goes live on top priority pages. Site is on Shopify – we tried google page insights while being logged into the production site but believe its just recording the speed of the password page. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brandonegroup1 -
Site Migration Question
Hi Guys, I am preparing for a pretty standard site migration. Small business website moving to a new domain, new branding and new cms. Pretty much a perfect storm. Right now the new website is being designed and will need another month, however the client is pretty antsy to get her new brand out over the web. We cannot change the current site, which has the old branding. She wants to start passing out business cards and hang banners with the new domain and brand. However, I don't want to be messing with any redirects and potentially screw up a clean migration from the old site to the new. To be specific, she wants to redirect the new domain to the current domain and then when the new site, flip the redirect. However, I'm a little apprehensive with that because a site migration from the current to the new is already so intricate, I don't want to leave any possibility of error. I'm trying to figure out the best solution, these are 2 options I am thinking of: DO NOT market new domain. Reprint all Marketing material and wait until new domain is up and then start marketing it. (At cost to client) Create a one pager on new domain saying the site is being built & have a No Follow link to the current site. No redirects added. Just the no follow link. I'd like option 2 so that the client could start passing out material, but my number one concern is messing with any part of the migration. We are about to submit a sitemap index to Google Search Console for the current site, so we are just starting the site migration. What do you guys think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Khoo0 -
How To Organise my URLS - Which is Optimal?
Hi all, I am currently in the process of re-writing my companies website URL structure. Compared to the way the website is structured at the minute, there's going to be a lot more URL's as the previous structure has missed out on a lot of search avenues that i intend to include within the rebuild. one of my issues is basically deciding under which category certain URL's come under, I can think of reasons for both sides but can't quite decide on which is optimal. My company is an automotive/car dealer so we sell cars for certain manufactures as well as offering a number of other services. what I'm curious about is what makes more sense in terms of the category that comes first in the URL. Here's what I am torn between; /(car manufacturer)/servicing OR /servicing/(car-manufacturer) To give you some more info that might influence the decision; In terms of generic keyword targeting, the majority would search in the order of '(car manufacturer) service' as opposed to 'service for (car manufacturer)'. Currently on our site, the sections /(manufacturer) are some of the most authoritative pages that we have on the website, but we've done very little work on /service in the past. For me, this would suggest that naturally the pages flowing from that URL would get an advantage in terms of authority/ranking. With either URL structure, the URL's are eventually going to cross paths - I just need to decide which one is best and should therefore feature first. Hopefully this is somewhat clear. I'd appreciate any suggestions or if you don't quite understand what I'm asking for then general URL advice is also appreciated. Many thanks Sam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sandicliffe0 -
Real Estate Site Question
I'm working on this site: www.aldodavico.com - who is a real estate agent in Miami. Any ideas/best practices for SEO for a site like this one? It's got about 500 pages. I've never deal with such a huge site before.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Facebook page optimization
I'm working with a client who is "under attack" by one unhappy customer. That customer created a Facebook page to share her outrage, and her page is outranking my client's (consistently immediately above his FB page). I've checked all of the obvious things... page name page URL About section, and all business-related data He has MANY more "Likes" than she does, makes posts far more frequently (with much better Engagement), references his company name in almost every Post (as she does), and on and on. My main question is this... are there one or two factors that seem to have the most impact on how a given FB page ranks? Thanks for your help, Moz family! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | measurableROI0 -
What this site is doing? Does it look like cloaking to you?
Hi here, I was studying our competitors SEO strategies, and I have noticed that one of our major competitors has setup something pretty weird from a SEO stand point for which I would like to know your thoughts about because I can't find a clear explanation for it. Here is the deal: the site is musicnotes.com, and their product pages are located inside the /sheetmusic/ directory, so if you want to see all their product pages indexed on Google, you can just type in Google: site:musicnotes.com inurl:/sheetmusic/ Then you will get about 290,000 indexed pages. No, here is the tricky part: try to click on one of those links, then you will get a 302 redirect to a page that includes a meta "noindex, nofollow" directive. Isn't that pretty weird? Why would they want to "nonidex, nofollow" a page from a 302 redirect? And how in the heck the redirecting page is still in the index?!! And how Google can allow that?! All this sounds weird to me and remind me spammy techniques of the 90s called "cloaking"... what do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
I have a general site for my insurance agency. Should I create niche sites too?
I work with several insurance agencies and I get this questions several times each month. Most agencies offer personal and business insurance and in a certain geographic location. I recommend creating a quality general agency site but would they have more success creating other nice sites as well? For example, a niche site about home insurance and one about auto insurance. What would your recommendation be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lagunaitech1 -
Optimization for an Car Image Gallery Site
I have a site where I feature several car images and the details/press releases about those cars. So normal layout would be an article page consisting of the following: Article Text Image gallery list laid out for user to browse. Now, when a user clicks on the image, the link opens up in another page with the image as a main content and then other image belonging to same article are shown below to browse. Each of such pages with images from same article are linked to one another with 'rel'=prev/next and has a 'rel' canonical to the page with article text. Am I doing this right to prevent thin content and duplication issue? Each of the images are for same car and are related to one another. The site under question is DieselStation. Also, if you can provide a general feedback on the site's layout and architecture in terms of SEO, that would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ketan90