Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
How important is it to add hyphens between words in URL Permalink Structure?
We have an issue with our URL Permalink Structures for dynamically generated pages on our website. As we generated hundreds of pages, it does not automatically Space the Words in the Permalink Structure . For example, if we have a product name Under Armour Fire Basketball Shoe , it will show up in the url as: "mywebsite.com/underarmourfire-basketballshoe" vs "mywebsite.com/under-armour-fire-basketball-shoe" How important is it that the URL includes these spaces between each word in the permalink?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NJ-Keith0 -
Looking to remove dates from URL permalink structure. What do you think of this idea?
I know most people who remove dates from their URL structure usually do so and then setup a 301 redirect. I believe that's the right way to go about this typically. My biggest fear with doing a global 301 redirect implementation like that across an entire site is that I've seen cases where this has sort of shocked Google and the site took a hit in organic traffic pretty bad. Heres what I'm thinking a safer approach would be and I'd like to hear others thoughts. What if... Changed permalink structure moving forward to remove the date in future posts. All current URLs stay as is with their dates Moving forward we would go back and optimize past posts in waves (including proper 301 redirects and better URL structure). This way we avoid potentially shocking Google with a global change across all URLs. Do you know of a way this is possible with a large Wordpress website? Do you see any conplications that could come about in this process? I'd like to hear any other thoughts about this please. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagJeff0 -
Multiple H2 tags
Is it advisable to use only one H2 tag? The template designs for some reason is ended up with multiple H2 tags, I realise if any think it's that each one is that are important and it is all relative. Just trying to assess if it's worth the time and effort to rehash the template. Has anyone done any testing or got any experience? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman101 -
If I block a URL via the robots.txt - how long will it take for Google to stop indexing that URL?
If I block a URL via the robots.txt - how long will it take for Google to stop indexing that URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gabriele_Layoutweb0 -
Attack of the dummy urls -- what to do?
It occurs to me that a malicious program could set up thousands of links to dummy pages on a website: www.mysite.com/dynamicpage/dummy123 www.mysite.com/dynamicpage/dummy456 etc.. How is this normally handled? Does a developer have to look at all the parameters to see if they are valid and if not, automatically create a 301 redirect or 404 not found? This requires a table lookup of acceptable url parameters for all new visitors. I was thinking that bad url names would be rare so it would be ok to just stop the program with a message, until I realized someone could intentionally set up links to non existent pages on a site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood1 -
Shopify Product Variants vs Separate Product Pages
Let's say I have 10 different models of hats, and each hat has 5 colors. I have two routes I could take: a) Make 50 separate product pages Pros: -Better usability for customer because they can shop for just masks of a specific color. We can sort our collections to only show our red hats. -Help SEO with specific kw title pages (red boston bruins hat vs boston bruins hat). Cons: -Duplicate Content: Hat model in one color will have almost identical description as the same hat in a different color (from a usability and consistency standpoint, we'd want to leave descriptions the same for identical products, switching out only the color) b) Have 10 products listed, each with 5 color variants Pros: -More elegant and organized -NO duplicate Content Cons: -Losing out on color specific search terms -Customer might look at our 'red hats' collection, but shopify will only show the 'default' image of the hat, which could be another color. That's not ideal for usability/conversions. Not sure which route to take. I'm sure other vendors must have faced this issue before. What are your thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | birchlore0 -
Canonical URLs and Sitemaps
We are using canonical link tags for product pages in a scenario where the URLs on the site contain category names, and the canonical URL points to a URL which does not contain the category names. So, the product page on the site is like www.example.com/clothes/skirts/skater-skirt-12345, and also like www.example.com/sale/clearance/skater-skirt-12345 in another category. And on both of these pages, the canonical link tag references a 3rd URL like www.example.com/skater-skirt-12345. This 3rd URL, used in the canonical link tag is a valid page, and displays the same content as the other two versions, but there are no actual links to this generic version anywhere on the site (nor external). Questions: 1. Does the generic URL referenced in the canonical link also need to be included as on-page links somewhere in the crawled navigation of the site, or is it okay to be just a valid URL not linked anywhere except for the canonical tags? 2. In our sitemap, is it okay to reference the non-canonical URLs, or does the sitemap have to reference only the canonical URL? In our case, the sitemap points to yet a 3rd variation of the URL, like www.example.com/product.jsp?productID=12345. This page retrieves the same content as the others, and includes a canonical link tag back to www.example.com/skater-skirt-12345. Is this a valid approach, or should we revise the sitemap to point to either the category-specific links or the canonical links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 379seo0 -
Magento: URLs for Products in Multiple Categories
I am working in Magento to build out a large e-commerce site with several thousand products. It's a great platform, but I have run into the issue of what it does to URLs when you put a product into multiple categories. Basically, "a book" in two categories would make two URLs for one product: 1) /books/a-book 2) author-name/a-book So, I need to come up with a solution for this. It seems I have two options: Found this from a Magento SEO article: 'Magento gives you the ability to add the name of categories to path for product URL's. Because Magento doesn't support this functionality very well - it creates duplicate content issues - it is a very good idea to disable this. To do this, go to System => Configuration => Catalog => Search Engine Optimization and set "Use categories path for product URL's to "no".' This would solve the issues and be a quick fix, but I think it's a double edged sword, because then we lose the SEO value of our well named categories being in the URL. Use Canonical tags. To be fair, I'm not even sure this is possible. Even though it is creating different URLs and, thus, poses a risk of "duplicate content" being crawled, there really is only one page on the admin side. So, I can't go to all of the "duplicate" pages and put a canonical tag, because those duplicate pages don't really exist on the back-end. Does that make sense? After typing this out, it seems like the best thing to do probably will be to just turn off categories in the URL from the admin side. However, I'd still love any input from the community on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing.SCG0