Will Moving Categories Affect SEO
-
I recently designed a new website to replace an old site. We managed to hold 90% ranking and traffic by keeping the same URS's and content.
Now that we have completed that we are now updating the whole site. It is an commerce website. Some of the items we were selling we are getting from a new vendor. If I move these products from one one vendor to another will this affect SEO?
Here is an example. I have a product called "Green Zipper Sweater". This product is Anchored via Manufacturer and Category. The URL and Title Tag are green-zipper-sweater. If the Sweater was made by "Nike Green Sweaters" and our new supplier is "Gap Yellow and Green Sweaters". If I change the the Manufacturer and now put it under "Gap Green and Yellow Sweaters" will this affect my ranking.
We are continuing to stock products from the original supplier "Nike Green Sweaters" and we have an aggressive SEO plan and are ranking very well for "Nike Green Sweaters". We also have good product ranking so "Green Zipper Sweater" brings us a lot of traffic. I want to be sure I do not loose ranking for the product page "Green Zipper Sweater" and the Brand "Nike Green Sweaters"
Any advice would be appreciated.
-
Hi
If you're URL / permalink is not changing than in theory all the off-page SEO for the page will be unaffected since the page still exists. So external link juice still has some where to go (to coin a phrase). But beware of the anchor text of the link (well be aware) - more about this below:
Andy makes a good point in that if you are changing manufacturer than most likely some of the text will change ( obviously "Nike" changes to "Gap" for example). So from an on-page SEO perspective the page has changed and this might affect how well the particular page ranks for "Nike Green Sweater" since quite obviously that particular page is no longer about Nike Green Sweaters and assuming the search engine bot is doing its job it will work this out and adjust indexing for that brand specific keyword combination.
To deal with that potential problem, I would suggest adding a link to the Nike Green Sweater page on the Gap Green Sweater page - you can do this quite naturally by adding a "related products" link or "people who bought this also bought" or "looking for Nike Green Sweater?" (for example).
This passes some of the link juice for your page to the Nike Green Sweater page.
Helping Nike Green Sweater Wearers...or Another Reason for an Internal Link:
Creating an internal link to the Nike Green Sweater page also helps people who came to your site through a link that explicitly referred to "Nike Green Sweaters" and were looking for "Nike Green Sweaters". (You could use a tool like AHREFs or Google Webmaster or Open Site Explorer to find the anchor text being used by people externally linking to you to get a sense of the scale of this "problem". )
-
FWIW, here's how I would attack this problem with SEO and internet marketing in mind:
- Add your new manufacturer as a separate entity/category... don't change the name of the existing category.
- When your inventory for the old manufacturer is sold through, build a separate landing page for that manufacturer. (ie domain.com/nike-green-sweaters)
- 301 redirect all of your former Nike green sweater inventory URLs and category page URLs to the new landing page /nike-green-sweaters/
- On /nike-green-sweaters/, include a transparent blurb informing potential customers that you no longer carry those products, but your store now proudly provides Gap Green Sweaters - or whatever the new product is (Gap green zipper sweater, green zipper sweater, etc.).
- Anchor text link in-content to your new manufacturer category with the highest volume, short tail keyword.
- Include maybe 2-4 more top products from that new manufacturer, and link to those pages with keyword rich anchors, too.
- BONUS: include an Amazon affiliate link or something similar to another retailer who sells the former product on that page, too - so at least if you refer some sales for the old product through your page, you can make something back for it!
Hope this is helpful. Good luck!
-
if i understand the question correctly and you are changing manufacturer. You have the potential to lose traffic as your page will no longer contain the text 'old manufacture name', so therefore wont rank for it this term.
If your urls aren't changing you shouldn't lose to as much visibility as any links etc pointing here will still be valid.
The only area where you could lose visibility is in the old manufacturers name if this had more search volume that the new manufacturer.
-
No they will be staying the same.
-
Is the permalink / URL changing for the product?
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
-
Drupal 8 tags and categories cause duplicate content shown in MOZ
Hi all, There is something difficult to trace that is causing duplicate content that is related to categories and tags i.e. https://example.com/contact Associated Pages https://example.com/tags/business https://example.com/taxonomy/term/41 example 2 https://example.com/category/example-category-1 Associated Pages https://example.com/category/occupiers-liability example 3 https://example.com/tags/test https://example.com/tags/test-2 Above two pages display same content (maybe due to similar posts feature) My question here is: Is this caused by Drupal website misconfiguration (or one of its modules) since website uses similar posts feature or it's something else. Duplicate content for example.com/index.php issue has been solved by redirects. Should something similar be done in case of tags / categories? Any discussion / suggestions on that matter are greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Moz Pro | | Optimal_Strategies0 -
SEO impact of redirecting high ranking mirror site to the main website
During SEO audit for a client I noticed that they had over a dozen duplicate websites that are carbon copies of the main website. This was done via CMS platform and DNS. One of the mirror sites has about 400 indexed pages and has Moz DA of 42 and 137k External Equity-Passing Links. Full metrics comparison is attached. I originally planned on doing rel="canonical" on the mirror site but the CMS vendor never even heard of it and is refusing to implement it in the header. My only other option is doing one to one 301 redirects. Since the mirror site ranks well, even competes with main domain for some positions on the 1st page of SERP, what will be the impact after the redirects? Is doing 301's still the best option? Thanks! PrUpN3q
Moz Pro | | dasickle0 -
I'm newly hired to start the SEO department at a company with 50+ websites, 30+ brands... Need help organizing this.
I was recently hired at a company with 30 brands, and many information portal sites. I'm having trouble figuring out how to squeeze 50+ sites into the 5 site limit of our Moz plan, and how to aggragate/organize all the sites into a system for the CEO. Imagine you wake up one day, and you now have 50 clients, all with heavy demands... And they all have the same CEO, who doesn't understand SEO, and expects you to explain everything to him in basic terms. The CEO wants more micromanagement, more analysis, more organization... Not quite sure how to go about it. I have woorank for some good data to act on. I setup a whole slew of google docs to track my workers and their SEO off-site tasks. I have buzzbundle and have setup nearly 100 accounts with my Social Media employee... It seems the CEO always feels that I'm not organized enough, not on top of enough etc... But its a massive job, and I was hired to literally start the entire department myself! They may be hiring an 'assistant' for me... But I'm worried the CEO feels that I'm just not on the ball enough... And with Moz, having only 5 'campaigns'/websites I can have going at a time... I'm short by at least 45 'campaigns'. Order another 10 Moz accounts?? There must be some solutions.. Thanks guys
Moz Pro | | iDingo2 -
Will moz crawl pages blocked by robots.txt and nofollow links?
i have over 2,000 temporary redirects in my campaign report redirects are mostly events like being redirected to a login page before showing the actual data im thinking of adding nofollow on the link so moz wont crawl the redirection to reduce the notification will this solve my problem?
Moz Pro | | WizardOfMoz0 -
SEO Web Crawler IP addresses
What are the IP addresses for the SEO Web Crawler? There is a firewall on my clients website before it goes live, I would like to crawl the site before it goes live, but need to provide the web crawlers IP addreses. Thank you for your time
Moz Pro | | sfchronicle1 -
Why cant I hook up facebook to SEO Moz Campaign Tool?
Greetings from the digital epicentre otherwise known as Wetherby Uk 😉 I want to track sentiments ie mentions, slurs fliratations of a brand on Facebook. So to start out with I thought 'Id hook up SEO moz social tracking service as illustrated here: http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/cant-add-facebook-url.jpg But whilst i could add my twitter account I caount not add my favebook page:http://www.facebook.com/david.honan.98I added david.honan.98 in the url box and a number of other versions but none successfully hooked up. Am enetering the wrong url or is SEO moz socail media facebook plugin jinxed? Thanks in advance, David
Moz Pro | | Nightwing0 -
<bs>Will someone give me a "thumbs up" so I can become an Authority and get my SEOMOZ T-Shirt?</bs>
<bs>I have helped many people (probably 100s) here in the forums. My fingers are swollen and I can't answer questions right now. I want my SEOmoz t-Shirt for becoming an Authority, but I'm a few points shy. Any help would be appreciated.</bs> Watch people give me a thumbs down. LOL
Moz Pro | | Francisco_Meza3 -
SEO MOZ keyword ranking tool
Hi Guys, Can anyone please help me! I have a client that has two web pages that he wants optimising, one page is the home page and the other page is within the page.. Does anyone know if the SEO MOZ ranking tool only looks at the home page for jeywords or will it look at what ranking is the the other page within the website?? Or do I have to set up separate campaign jut for one page within the website?? Can anyone answer this please? Thanks Gareth
Moz Pro | | GAZ090