Proper structure for site with multiple catagories of same products
-
Hi, we have products (trophies and awards) that can be catagorized in many ways. Using Award Medals as an example: - Medals by type: 1 1/2", 2", etc. - Medals by sport Baseball, Basketball, Cheer - Medals by Style Color, Gold, Silver, Bronze Right now, we have an Award Medals section off of our home page. The section has a decent page rank, but should be much better (I think). My guess is that we are loosing page range since we have separate sections with the groups above as we want our customers to be able to find the medals easily. Unfortunately, when we setup our site 10 years ago, we organized by type and this is what is hanging off the home page. The other groupings we added more recently. I have attached a snap shot of what the sections look like. We would like customers to find an individual medal when they do a Google search. For example a search for Baseball Medals. In Goggle, they likely would not search for 1 1/2" medals. My question is this: Can we keep the same structure we have today (to enable customer flexibility) but improve page rank and also have the sections like basball medals rank well? I have thought about using canonical tags, but the pages are not the same - in one case it is all baseball medals, in another it is all 1 1/2" medals, etc. Thanks for your help!!
-
Thanks, Alan, I understand now...
-
a 301 redirect is a server level or site level command to a web browser to jump to the page the redirect is pointing to. A canonical tag within a page is only a signal to a search engine to not count / index this page, but count/index the page in the canonical tag.
-
Thanks, Alan. This makes sense. One question on #3 - the 301 redirect:
Assume I have a page, say medals1 and aonther page medals2 - both with similar and essentially pointing to many of the same products.
If I do a 301 redirect from medals2 to medals1, is that only an instruction to the search engines, or will someone on my site on the medals2 page see something different?
Thank!
-
I get this same issue a lot - just about or nearly every time I'm hired to perform a forensic audit on an ecommerce site...
Here's how I responded in one of my recent audits to this question:
Search engines struggle to then determine “which of these two nearly identical pages is the original source, which is more authoritative, and which is merely an attempt to own two positions in search results for the same company.
Sometimes search engines overcome that struggle in a positive way, other times their automated systems fail miserably. More often than not, on an initial look, you don’t even realize how much of a problem it is if you think you’re doing well in your organic search based visits.
In reality, every page that competes with every other page results in a cannibalization effect. Every page suffers, at least a little, and cumulatively, entire sites suffer way more than you might even comprehend.
Solutions for consideration:
-
Keep all copies of each product but make them unique. If they are kept, every version or instance of a product needs to have its content completely re-written so that it is truly unique compared to every other instance.
-
Keep all copies of each product but decide which ones you want the search engines to find and rank - every other version should be blocked from indexing. Do not rely on Google to figure out which to keep and which to rank and which to not.
-
Eliminate as many copies as possible by considering consolidation of products detail pages while maintaining access to them from multiple categories. 301 Redirect all copies of every version of those product details pages except the primary one you intend to keep indexed and ranked in search engines.
There's a lot more to consider such as canonical implementation, however in addition to the issue with canonical you already described, the fact is that canonical tags are only signals. they are NOT directives, so that's relying on Google to figure it out.
-
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
-
My site Metrics are not as per they should
Hi, I am regularly making links on my site to improve its metrics but i am confused how other people fastly improve their DA/PA and my DA/PA is not improving with that site. The same happened with spam score. It has been a month i disavow my links having spam score but instead of decrease in it, my spam score increased. Please advice. Is there any special way to use that help moz crawler to check site and update accordingly? Please help
Technical SEO | | AzadSeo37310 -
Internal Ads on A Site
We serve ads on our site using a sub-domain. All ads use a re-direct from ads.domain before redirecting users to the proper, normal, internal url. Most the content on our home page is ad block driven. Is it possible and does it make sense to enter the sub-domain as url parameter in Google Webmaster tools, letting Google know that this is something to be ignored. Many thanks
Technical SEO | | CeeC-Blogger0 -
Multiple domains pointing to same site
Over the years, we have acquired a great number of variations of our domains, or industry-specific domains to protect our brand. Currently, the majority of those domains are parked at the registrars. Would we do any harm to our rankings if we pointed the dormant domains to our website (www.ellsworth.com)? If not, are there any recommendations as the best way to do this, or just point them to the same IP?
Technical SEO | | Ellsworth0 -
Mobile site rank on Google S.E. instead of desktop site.
Hello, all SEOers~ Today, I would like to hear your opinion regarding on Mobile site and duplicate contents issue. I have a mobile version of our website that is hosted on a subdomain (m instead www). Site is targeting UK and Its essentially the same content, formatted differently. So every URL on www exists also at the "m" subdomain and is identical content. (there are some different contents, yet I could say about 90% or more contents are same) Recently I've noticed that search results are showing links to our mobile site instead of the desktop site. (Google UK) I have a sitemap.xml for both sites, the mobile sitemap defined as follows: I didn't block googlebot from mobile site and also didn't block googlebot-mobile from desktop site. I read and watched Google webmaster tool forum and related video from Matt Cutts. I found many opinion that there is possibility which cause duplicate contents issue and I should do one of followings. 1. Block googlebot from mobile site. 2. Use canonical Tag on mobile site which points to desktop site. 3. Create and develop different contents (needless to say...) Do you think duplicate contents issue caused my mobile site rank on S.E. instead of my desktop site? also Do you think those method will help to show my desktop site on S.E.? I was wondering that I have multi-country sites which is same site format as I mentioned above. However, my other country sites are totally doing fine on Google. Only difference that I found is my other country sites have different Title & Meta Tag comparing to desktop site, but my UK mobile site has same Title & Meta Tag comparing to desktop. Do you think this also has something to do with current problem? Please people~! Feel free to make some comments and share your opinion. Thanks for reading my long long explanation.
Technical SEO | | Artience0 -
Any good ideas on how to quickly rank a new site for a new product laucnh?
Hi, I'm thinking of examples like the wii u - when it was announced all wii u sites were new. what ways could one get an edge quickly when competing against other sites without a great deal of authority on this 'new' keyword? obvious ones are social bookmarking, what else could easily be used to quickly (<24hrs) at least help a bit in non competitive kws?
Technical SEO | | dmn020 -
My site ranking
Hello, I have a website and working more than 1 year ago,I worked hard last year and paid alot to make guys write articles from my website to other forums so my keywords rank high and got good visitors, then I get in much care in SEO and found SEOMoz with is very nice,when I downloaded the tool bar it was a shock to find my website is almost zero although the big effort I had, I can do more but I need to guide what I exactly need to improve my website,I almost read alot of the beginner PDF and got good information to work with and can hire people to help too. I did a real big work sharing my subjects and i can see them in top#5 google but for other sites and now i found I am still zero 😞 adding my links inside also didnt help or counted. attached the statistics of the website and the competitors site to let me know which important things to take care to jump over. would be very thankful for detailed help, Best Regards 1_01308477251.png 1_01308477465.png
Technical SEO | | nesr_20200