Changing categorisation effect on SEO
-
Hi
I work on an ecommerce shop & we've discussed changing some of out categories.
We have one named cupboards & lockers, but want to split this out, so we have Cupboards then Lockers so customers can browse through our main navigation like this.
For SEO I know initially our rankings will be affected, but long term moving categories up a level will be an improvement & will be more relevant - has anyone does this before and could provide any advice?
Becky
-
Sometimes, you just gotta try.
-
Thanks for the reply.
I can definitely do this, they're both important, which is why we want to split them. In terms of SEO I also think having defined categories and moving them higher up in the site structure is worth doing - I just have no stats to prove this as it hasn't been done before
Thanks!
-
I would look at the bottom line, which one do you sell more? Which one makes more profit on average per months worth of sales? Whichever one that is, use the old category URL for it and 301 redirect to the new URL for the more profitable URL. Then for a temporary period, keep a banner or a little link or something like that on the new URL that clearly directs users who are looking for the less profittable product's new URL to the right location.
That's the best I can think of. I had done this on a car rental company where they lost some of their cars and had to take down the URLs but we instead 301 redirected to the next closest choice and made some changes to "feature" the other related cars as well.
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
-
Effect on SEO with growing number of subdomains
Since a few days I'm having some concernes on our website structure regarding SEO. Since I can't find similar cases I'm curious if the Moz community maybe have a few thoughts on the issue I'm facing The situation is as follow: For every new client our company (hosting) receives through www.example.com a new subdomain is created. This subdomain is an backup of the original website of the client and is very much irrelevant to our business. Google can also crawl these subdomains and index them. Productvariant 1: clientxxx1.productX.example.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Steven87
Productvariant 2: clientxxx1.productY.example.com
Productvariant 3: cleintxx10.productZ.example.com So I think above situation is far from ideal and I think it can cause problems. The problems we could be facing where Im thinking of are: no control over content (spam, low quality, bad optimised pages) duplicate sites (the backup on our subdomain and the original one of the client) impossible to make/manage a property for each subdomain in search console. Huge amount of subdomains which could influence crawl/indexation by Google. Maybe there are some more issues we could face where I didn't think of? The most common fix would be to use an other domain for the backups like client1.host-example.com and prevent Google from crawling it. This way www.example.com wouldn't be affected. So my questions basically are: 1. How much will this influence rankings for www.example.com
2. Are there any similar cases and what effect did it have on rankings/crawl/indexation when it got fixed / didn't got fixed?0 -
Technical SEO
Where can I find knowledge of enhanced and technical SEO for all type of websites ( mainly E-Commerce)? Please share some good sources (PDFs, Videos, Checklist etc)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Changing website framework: Any negative SEO ramifications?
Hello! We have a website that is built using Asp.net. My colleague and I are wondering whether or not changing the framework from Asp.net to php or html would have any negative impact on current rankings. My colleague was told by an SEO company that doing this would have a big negative effect, but we just can't see why that would be. The URLs of the site do not have an .asp extension, so we don't feel there would be any issues with 404s after the migration. The content, meta data and URL structure would remain the same. We posted this question in the Webmaster Central Forum and were told by a top contributor that it wouldn't have any negative impact, but we wanted a second opinion here. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBEXNinja0 -
Two sites with same content in different countries. How does it effect SEO?
Lets say for example that we have to sites, example.com and example.co.uk. The sites has the same content in the same language. Can the sites rank well in its own country? Of course all content could be rewritten, but that is very time consuming. Any suggestions? Has anyone did this before or now a site which has?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fredrikahlen0 -
Local SEO and PO Boxes
What is the best way to do local SEO when the business has a physical address, but the mailing address is through a PO Box. Can you still list your business on Google Maps, Google places, yahoo, bing etc... with the physical address?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | melen0 -
Redirection Effects on Sub Domain
Hi, I would try to summarize my query through an example. Lets say site A (www.siteA.com) have two sub domain (subdomain1.siteA.com & subdomain2.siteA.com) and another site B ( www.siteB.com ) have no sub domain. Due to some obvious reason we need re direct the site site A (www.siteA.com) to site B ( www.siteB.com ) and one of the sub domain (subdomain1.siteA.com) to site B (subdomain1.siteB.com). Now the question is that in case of ( subdomain2.siteA.com ) can we keep the sub domain to site A even though site A has been re directed to site B ? Reasons for keeping this can be traffic, earnings etc. Is it possible to keep it like that or provision for further optimization? Plz help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ITRIX0 -
Would using display:none; to hide a section of text effect SEO negatively?
I have seen several sites that put a div feature at the bottom of a page to hide content. If you click on the button, it will extend the page down and be loaded with paragraphs of text rich with keywords. Does anyone know is this is viewed as a negative with Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netmkting0 -
SEO question
Hi i changed my page titles for a competitive keyword last week and noticed it has dropped 9 search engine ranking positions. Was ranking 37 and now it 46. Would you guys leave it and see if it starts creeping back up or change again? the page title i used was across my pages for example was Primary keyword | secondary keyword | Heading on page thanks for you help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wazza19850