Url structure for multiple search filters applied to products
-
We have a product catalog with several hundred similar products. Our list of products allows you apply filters to hone your search, so that in fact there are over 150,000 different individual searches you could come up with on this page. Some of these searches are relevant to our SEO strategy, but most are not.
Right now (for the most part) we save the state of each search with the fragment of the URL, or in other words in a way that isn't indexed by the search engines. The URL (without hashes) ranks very well in Google for our one main keyword. At the moment, Google doesn't recognize the variety of content possible on this page. An example is:
http://www.example.com/main-keyword.html#style=vintage&color=blue&season=spring
We're moving towards a more indexable URL structure and one that could potentially save the state of all 150,000 searches in a way that Google could read. An example would be:
http://www.example.com/main-keyword/vintage/blue/spring/
I worry, though, that giving so many options in our URL will confuse Google and make a lot of duplicate content. After all, we only have a few hundred products and inevitably many of the searches will look pretty similar. Also, I worry about losing ground on the main http://www.example.com/main-keyword.html page, when it's ranking so well at the moment.
So I guess the questions are:
-
Is there such a think as having URLs be too specific? Should we noindex or set rel=canonical on the pages whose keywords are nested too deep?
-
Will our main keyword's page suffer when it has to share all the inbound links with these other, more specific searches?
-
-
Hey, that sounds fairly solid. let me know how you get on.
-
Thanks for the links and the advice, Marcus.
I think after reading through the material I will meta noindex any search that has more than one search filter applied. So I'll index "blue" or "vintage" but not "vintage/blue" for instance. The most important top level search filters will become category pages, more or less. I'll try to tailor their content to reflect their importance. Thanks for your input!
-
Hey,
Certainly, if you could potentially create 150,000 search result pages from only 200 or so products, then you are straying into the ground of near duplicate pages and what is often known as 'search within search'. As you stated, chances are not only could these pages be problematic in themselves, they may drag down other pages.
My advice here would be to try and tie this to your search marketing and keyword research. Look at the actual terms that get searched for and consider some pages that may be useful. Then, if you don't have a page for this, then consider creating maybe tags or categories for these few (certainly less than 150,000) pages and supplement these pages with some additional unique content if there is duplication with other categories.
In fact, try to keep the duplication as low as possible and also try to stick to best practice with those search category pages (canonical, prev next, show all page etc).
Certainly have the search, but I would most likely hide it from search engines and noindex the deep search pages but supplement these with some category pages and/or content pages as tied to your keyword strategy.
Some interesting reading:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-results-in-search-results/
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content
Alternatively, you could always tinker, and have a go, and then put things back, but odds are, this approach is just creating nearly 150,000 near duplicate pages which are exactly the kind of pages they are currently trying to remove from the index so your main landing pages may end up being collateral damage.
Hope this helps!
Marcus
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
-
Product page as homepage
Hello, Is it ok that to use the homepage of website as a product page directly where you present all your products on your homepage or can it penalise you to do that ? and in that case, is it better to have a homepage that you don't rank and create a subpage for your product page. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Product Descriptions for a product with many designs
I'm a newbie with SEO and I have a question regarding product descriptions. Let's say I am selling 100 dog id tags. The tags are all made of same materials, same size, just different designs. Now for the product description, do I need to write a different set of description for all 100 tags? This is an example of a short product description(there's more) for all the pet tags: Personalized with 4 lines of information and 20 characters in each line. Lifetime guarantee - If your pet ID tag ever becomes illegible, we will replace it free of charge. Solid one-piece construction - No glued or ""sandwiched"" materials to wear out or fall apart. Split ring for collar attachement included with EVERY tag. Countless uses - School backpacks, luggage, fashion accessories, and many more! All of the above information pertains to all the pet tags. Can all my product descriptions contain that information, or will I need to modify this 100 times for each individual pet tag? I read up a lot on duplicate content so I am slightly confused. Will this hurt my SEO? Thanks, Keith
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ktw0160 -
Canonical url question
i just search seomoz tooll it say duplicate content for www.mysite.com and www.mysite.com/index.php should i use canonical url for this ? is yes then is this right ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | constructionhelpline0 -
Spaces in URL line
Hi Gurus, I recently made the mistake of putting a space into a URL line between two words that make up my primary key word. Think www.example.com/Jelly Donuts/mmmNice.php instead of www.example.com/JellyDonuts/mmmNice.php This mistake now needed fixing to www.example.com/Jelly Donuts/mmmNice.php to pass W3, but has been in place for a while but most articles/documents under 'Jelly Donuts' are not ranking well (which is probably the obvious outcome of the mistake). I am wondering whether the best solution from an SEO ranking viewpoint is to: 1. Change the article directory immediately to www.example.com/JellyDonuts/mmmNice.php and rel=canonical each article to the new correct URL. Take out the 'trash' using robots.txt or to 301 www.example.com/Jelly Donut to the www.example.com/JellyDonut directory? or perhaps something else? Thanks in advance for your help with this sticky (but tasty) conundrum, Brad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BM70 -
Keyword search filter in Google Adwords: broad? exact? phrase?
Hello all I am working in my website and analysing the potential best keywords for the SEO (post/page name and url path name). 1. I am using Google Adwords. Any other tool you would recommend? 2. Which selection should I make in the Google Adwords Keyword Tool in order to know the monthly global searches of the keywords I should target? Exact? Phrase? Broad? For instance, KEYWORD SEARCH:"Information about Madrid" BROAD MATCH: 300,000 EXACT MATCH: 1,500 Te potential of the keyword is 300,000? 300,000 searches are undertaken on a month that contains that sentence and its variations? Or the relevant keyword potential is the exacta match traffic? Thank you very much! Antonio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aalcocer20030 -
Canonical URL Question
Hi Everyone I like to run this question by the community and get a second opinion on best practices for an issue that I ran into. I got two pages, Page A is the original page and Page B is the page with duplicate content. We already added** ="Page A**" />** to the duplicate content (Page B).** **Here is my question, since Page B is duplicate content and there is a link rel="canonical" added to it, would you put in the time to add meta tags and optimize the title of the page? Thanks in advance for all your help.**
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRTBA0 -
Removing dashes in our URLs?
Hi Forum, Our site has an errant product review module that is resulting in about 9-10 404 errors per day on Google Webmaster Tools. We've found that by changing our product page URLs to only include 2 dashes, the module stops causing 404 errors for that page. Does changing our URL from "oursite.com/girls-pink-yoga-capri.html" to "oursite.com/girlspink-yoga-capri.html" hurt our SEO for a search for "girls pink yoga capri"? If so, by how much (assuming everthing else on the page is optimized properly) Thanks for your input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pano0 -
Organic Search Problems?
Hey guys, I am in need of a little help! I am currently an aspiring SEO (trying to absorb as much information as I can and implement changes to help my site organically)... Most of my experience revolves around SEM. That being said, I have a problem. My site is doing well through paid search... great quality scores, etc. However, the content on my site (and even my site as a whole) does not "appear" to rank well in Organic. To explain further... My site is federalautoloan.com... and when I type in exact article names (or even federal auto loan) into Google, nothing shows up. And yes, my content is all original/unique content. I've even recently added a unique Calculator to my site. site:federalautoloan.com in the search bar shows results for all of my pages... but it just seems as though Google does not like my site for some reason. At least in Organic. The odd thing is, none of my other sites have this problem. Do you guys have any advice? The only thing I can think of is that somehow my 301 redirect was performed improperly. Yes, I had a permanent redirect performed on my site about 4 months back. The URL we were using prior just wasn't performing as well in Paid Search. But seeing as how that is the preferred method by Google... I'm really at a loss... Again, my site is FederalAutoLoan.com. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated. Even generic SEO advice would be appreciated. Edit: Two other things to note... I have plugged my site into the SEOmoz Pro tool... the tool is not showing any issues for my site. I am also making use of Google Webmaster Tools and the only error that shows up for my site is a Soft 404 for one of my pmcs... Not sure why it is even pulling one of my pmcs... but as far as I can tell, there really shouldn't be any problems. Note on the 404 for anyone who might give a response on that issue... http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers returns a 200 OK response. Edit2: Question presented below.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WPColt0