What to do about endless size pages
-
I'm working on a site that sells products that come in many different sizes. One product may come in 30 sizes.The products themselves are identical, except for the size. There are collections pages that are all of several kinds of product in a particular size and then there are individual product pages of one product the specific size. Collections pages for widgets size 30 is the same content as widgets size 29. A single product page for gold-widget-size-30 is the same content as the single product page gold-widget-size-29.
To make matters worse, they all have the same tags and very little written content. The site is in Shopify. Last month there were almost 400 pages that produced visits on organic, mostly in the 1 to 4 per month range, but all together about 1000 visits.
There are several hundred more that produced no traffic in organic, but are duplicate (except for size) and part of this giant ball of tangled string.
What do you think I should do?
Thanks... Mike
-
Hi Nigel,
Thanks for the message. So, just to cap on this, I've got:
150 pages that got any kind of organic landing last month.
115 of those pages are 1 visit out 13000 visits
525 pages in the sitemap
4300 pages in Google's index
if you were me you would noindex/de-index all but about 50 that either have traffic or am working on it and then noindex/deindex/remove from sitemap 4250 pages?
How would I even get a list of everything in Google's index?
Just wondering about the actual process for fixing this.
Thanks! Best... Mike
-
Hi Michael,
Yes - OK forget the brand pages - I had to make some assumptions from what you had written.
Cut it down and write contextually strong descriptive content 3-400 words at category & Sub-cat level.
I work with a lot of eCommerce sites that have fallen victim to pernicious tags, sizes and colours appending themselves to every version of a page.
It might look great having 50000 pages splattered all over Google but can you honestly say that they provide value and a good UX for the consumer?
Make each page sing for it's supper. Have a keywords or small group of contextually similar content for each page and add the written content and you will nail it.
Use MOZ Keyword explorer to provide you will the closely matched keywords,
I hope that helps,
Kind Regards
Nigel
-
Hi Egol & Nigel,
Egol, I always appreciate your answers over the years - thank you!
The site has a Moz domain authority of 37. It's in a organic/product niche with Amazon, Nordstrom, and about a buzzillion other national brand retailers. It makes and sells only its own products.
When you say, "if you have a weak site and you need highly optimized pages to get the traffic, then I might keep things "as is," I get confused. As it is, we have an endless number of duplicate pages. Shouldn't I just pick my winners (adding content there), noindex/nofollow and de-index?
If so, what do I do about the ones that randomly produce in organic search now? Same thing and suffer the loss?
Nigel, super interesting post... thank you! I'm not sure I totally understood everything. The site is the brand, not a retailer of others brands. In any case, you're saying cut it way down?
Thanks!
Best... Mike
-
Sorry but I think the opposite.
If you are a weak site with few back links and a low domain authority then you need to concentrate as much juice through as fewer pages as possible whilst retaining a strong fairly flat hierarchy. You don't have the option of doing nothing as you are cannibalizing your site in search.
I deduce from what you are saying that you have this problem.
Site/size
Site/Collection-1/Size
Site/Collection-2/Sub-collection-1/SizeSo the size filter can be applied to any part of the site at collection level. You may also have
Site/Brand/Size
Site/Brand/Collection/Size
Site/Brand/Collection/Sun-Collection-1/SizeThen you will have maybe
Site/Sale/Size
Site/Sale/Collection-1/Size
Site/Sale/Colelction-1/Sub-collection-1/SizeOn top of this problem you will have
Site/Brand/Product-1/Size-29
Site/Brand/Product-1/Size-30Etc
I hope I am right!
Solution for Brands and Categories
it is better to have size as a tag and noindex/nofollow the tag group so that none of these extra pages get indexed in Google. This will make an enormous difference to your website slashing the number of pages with skinny content and visits right down.
You simply can not have these pages:
Site/Brand/Size
Competing with the main brand page ie
Site/Brand/
I don't know how many sizes you have but say there are 20, then it's like having 20 duplicates of the brand page, the category page, the category/sub category page.
Solution For Products.
Have one product page:
Site/Brand/Product-1
The sizes can then drop down on the page without changing the URL - the canonical on any size is thus
Site/Brand/Product-1
Some sites will append the tag for size thus:
Site/Brand/Product-1#size30
With the size as an attribute - everything after the # is not indexable as Google does not go beyond a #
It would also be prudent to do this for colour as well otherwise you will get mass duplication at colour level. That should also be treated as a tag or attribute that does not append to every version of a page.
I really do hope I have understood this correctly.
I repeat, You don't have the option of doing nothing as you are cannibalizing your site for search.
eCommerce site structure is core to my business.
Kind Regards
Nigel
-
My answer would depend upon two things... 1) the strength of your website, and 2) the number and strength of your competitors.
If you have a really strong site and weak competition then I would have a small number of pages with a lot of products on each page. It will probably rank well against the competition for even the very specific queries.
However, if you have a weak site and you need highly optimized pages to get the traffic, then I might keep things "as is".
We started out with the first option and that worked great for years. Now the competition is getting fierce and we might go with a larger number of pages to keep holding them off.
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
-
Images on their own page?
Hi Mozers, We have images on their own separate pages that are then pulled onto content pages. Should the standalone pages be indexable? On the one hand, it seems good to have an image on it's own page, with it's own title. On the other hand, it may be better SEO for crawler to find the image on a content page dedicated to that topic. Unsure. Would appreciate any guidance! Yael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater1 -
May integrating my main category page in the index page improve my ranking of main category keyword?
90% of our sales are made with products in one of our product categories.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
A search for main category keyword returns our root domain index page in google, not the category page.
I was wondering whether integrating the complete main category directly in the index page of the root domain and this way including much more relevant content for this main category keyword may have a positive impact on our google ranking for the main category keyword. Any thoughts?1 -
How do we decide which pages to index/de-index? Help for a 250k page site
At Siftery (siftery.com) we have about 250k pages, most of them reflected in our sitemap. Though after submitting a sitemap we started seeing an increase in the number of pages Google indexed, in the past few weeks progress has slowed to a crawl at about 80k pages, and in fact has been coming down very marginally. Due to the nature of the site, a lot of the pages on the site likely look very similar to search engines. We've also broken down our sitemap into an index, so we know that most of the indexation problems are coming from a particular type of page (company profiles). Given these facts below, what do you recommend we do? Should we de-index all of the pages that are not being picked up by the Google index (and are therefore likely seen as low quality)? There seems to be a school of thought that de-indexing "thin" pages improves the ranking potential of the indexed pages. We have plans for enriching and differentiating the pages that are being picked up as thin (Moz itself picks them up as 'duplicate' pages even though they're not. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggiaco-siftery0 -
What to do when your home page an index for a series of pages.
I have created an index stack. My home page is http://www.southernwhitewater.com The home page is the index itself and the 1st page http://www.southernwhitewater.com/nz-adventure-tours-whitewater-river-rafting-hunting-fishing My home page (if your look at it through moz bat for chrome bar} incorporates all the pages in the index. Is this Bad? I would prefer to index each page separately. As per my site index in the footer What is the best way to optimize all these pages individually and still have the customers arrive at the top to a picture. rel= canonical? Any help would be great!! http://www.southernwhitewater.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VelocityWebsites0 -
An affiliate website uses datafeeds and around 65.000 products are deleted in the new feeds. What are the best practises to do with the product pages? 404 ALL pages, 301 Redirect to the upper catagory?
Note: All product pages are on INDEX FOLLOW. Right now this is happening with the deleted productpages: 1. When a product is removed from the new datafeed the pages stay online and are showing simliar products for 3 months. The productpages are removed from the categorie pages but not from the sitemap! 2. Pages receiving more than 3 hits after the first 3 months keep on existing and also in the sitemaps. These pages are not shown in the categories. 3. Pages from deleted datafeeds that receive 2 hits or less, are getting a 301 redirect to the upper categorie for again 3 months 4. Afther the last 3 months all 301 redirects are getting a customized 404 page with similar products. Any suggestions of Comments about this structure? 🙂 Issues to think about:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox
- The amount of 404 pages Google is warning about in GWT
- Right now all productpages are indexed
- Use as much value as possible in the right way from all pages
- Usability for the visitor Extra info about the near future: Beceause of the duplicate content issue with datafeeds we are going to put all product pages on NOINDEX, FOLLOW and focus only on category and subcategory pages.0 -
Content per page?
We used to have an articles worth of content in a scroll box created by our previous SEO, the problem was that it was very much keyword stuffed, link stuffed and complete crap. We then removed this and added more content above the fold, the problem I have is that we are only able to add 150 - 250 words above the fold and a bit of that is repetition across the pages. Would we benefit from putting an article at the bottom of each of our product pages, and when I say article I mean high quality in depth content that will go into a lot more detail about the product, history and more. Would this help our SEO (give the page more uniqueness and authority rather than 200 - 250 word pages). If I could see one problem it would be would an articles worth of content be ok at the bottom of the page and at that in a div tab or scroll box.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Should I block temporary pages
I need some SEO advice on an odd scenario: We are launching a new product line (party supplies) on it's own domain (PartySuperCenter.com). Due to some internal/technical reasons we will not be able to launch the site until the summer. We already have the product in our warehouse so the owners want to created a section on our current site (CostumeSuperCenter.com) for the new products. Once the new site is up the product will be removed from our current site and moved to the new site. I am concerned about the effect this will have on our SEO - having thousands of product pages appear and then disappear after a few months. I was thinking about blocking the pages using the "noindex" tag. Is this how you would handle it? Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | costume0 -
How Bad is it to Not Have a Home Page?
The site I'm currently developing is far different than any other project I've every worked on in that search traffic is likely to represent only a very small percentage of the total traffic. Because of this, I want to make sure I optimize the site for the people clicking from Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc more so than the BIG G. I can't for the life of me think of a reason to have a home page other than for SEO purposes. I'd much rather throw the user directly into the experience than have him be distracted by a home page. At the same time, I'd like to salvage any search engine traffic that I can. My plan is to 301 redirect chucklebot.com/ to /funny-memes/SOME_RANDOM_IMAGE and then put the content of the current home page at /about. Does that kill any possibility of the site ranking well? Or can the subpages (eg /meme-generator) still rank well if they are properly optimized? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PatrickGriffith0