No-Indexing on Ecommerce site
-
Hi
Our site has a lot of similar/lower quality product pages which aren't a high priority - so these probably won't get looked at in detail to improve performance as we have over 200,000 products .
Some of them do generate a small amount of revenue, but an article I read suggested no-indexing pages which are of little value to improve site performance & overall structure.
I wanted to find out if anyone had done this and what results they saw? Will this actually improve rankings of our focus areas?
It makes me a bit nervous to just block pages so any advice is appreciated
-
Do you have traffic data for any of these pages? If they're landing pages and garner clicks then obviously you'll want to keep them indexed.
The revenue you're receiving from these pages could be due to users navigating to them from brand pages, product categories, menus, or it could be cross-selling, etc.
I would say consolidate as many as you can for UX purposes so a customer doesn't have to click off of the page for another color or size.
-
Hi,
Yes it's more than 20%.
The products are a combination of products we've had to take from sister companies, the content isn't duplicate, but I wouldn't say it's high quality or optimised.
The other kind is products with duplicate into on our own site, some of these ideally need to be merged onto one product page - but this is a big dev project I don't have much control of at the moment.
When disallowing by Robots.txt, the only issue I have is I would have to manually add URLs, as we don't have sub-categories in our URLs.
Thank you for your suggestions - these are really helpful. Is there a preferred option for SEO?
Even with moving products down on the product listings - these will still be crawled so does this help tidy the technical structure in anyway?
Thank you
-
Hi Becky,
I have a few questions:
- How many is a lot? More than 20%?
- What does "lower quality products" mean? Do you have products with duplicated content which can be found also in another ecommerce sites? Or do you have (near) duplicates within your website?
- And, how many visitors did come to that product pages from the search engines? Can you exclude them without big consequences?
Probably, using of the noindex won't have positive impact on the rankings for more important pages. The noindexed pages will be still crawled and they will get a link juice.
Disallow by robots.txt could be better solution. But it seems to be very complicated.
Try to consider these solutions:
- Solution 1: Move lower quality product to the end of the product listing. Important products should be in the beginning.
- Solution 2: Exclude products from the product listing. You can keep it in database, findable by internal search.
- Solutions 3: Merge similar products, use only one URL. If products have another feature like color, user would choose it by select box.
- Solutions 4: Choose one main product and similar products can be used as "sub products" (check image with the example below)
Jan.
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
-
Mirror from my site
hi to all i find 2 site they do mirror my site and send back link to all my pages. do you thing its bad for my seo ?? my site is https://android-apk.org mirror sites | Who links the most | fryeboysent.com | 1,342,613 |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moztabliq1
| ficyexp.cl | 934,654 | |0 -
Moving html site to wordpress and 301 redirect from index.htm to index.php or just www.example.com
I found page duplicate content when using Moz crawl tool, see below. http://www.example.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gozmoz
Page Authority 40
Linking Root Domains 31
External Link Count 138
Internal Link Count 18
Status Code 200
1 duplicate http://www.example.com/index.htm
Page Authority 19
Linking Root Domains 1
External Link Count 0
Internal Link Count 15
Status Code 200
1 duplicate I have recently transfered my old html site to wordpress.
To keep the urls the same I am using a plugin which appends .htm at the end of each page. My old site home page was index.htm. I have created index.htm in wordpress as well but now there is a conflict of duplicate content. I am using latest post as my home page which is index.php Question 1.
Should I also use redirect 301 im htaccess file to transfer index.htm page authority (19) to www.example.com If yes, do I use
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com/index.php
or
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com Question 2
Should I change my "Home" menu link to http://www.example.com instead of http://www.example.com/index.htm that would fix the duplicate content, as indx.htm does not exist anymore. Is there a better option? Thanks0 -
Best practices for structuring an ecommerce site
I'm revamping my wife's ecommerce site. It is currently a very low traffic website that is not indexed very well in Google. So, my plan is to restructure it based upon the best practices that helps me avoid duplicate content penalties, and easier to index strategies. The store has about 7 types of products. Each product has approximately 30 different size variations that are sometimes specifically searched for. For example: 20x10x1 air filters, 20x10x2 air filters, 20x10x1 allergy reducing air filters, etc So, is it best for me to create 7 different products with 30 different size variations (size selector at the product level that changes the price) or is it better to create 210 different product pages, one for each style/size?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pherbio0 -
Why Did My Site Go Limp On Me?
One of my clients was once in the #1 position for "Philadelphia interior designer" and other related terms, but her site has dropped significantly. Still it is on the first page, but far from its former glory. http://www.interiorsbydonnahoffman.com is the site. What really confuses me is why in her home turf search of "Bucks County Interior Designer" a competitor, http://www.miriamansellinteriors.com, is above her in the SERPS. According to OSE her competitor has a PA of 32 vs my client's 39. My client has 35 Linking Root Domains (and some of high quality) compared to just 11 for the competition. In all aspects her competitor looks weaker and less relevant to me. Her site has been weak in the SERPs since May/June. We are redesigning her site- she has a high bounce rate compared to my other interior design clients, something like 55%. Any insights from y'all?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dfhytrwy0 -
Is this site worth subscribing to?
Hi everyone is, the below site worthwhile submitting to? I see one of our competitors is on here and the article they have published has in turn be picked up by other sites. Is the financial cost worth the back link reward? https://app.prweb.com/Main.aspx?Entity=Home
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hardley10 -
Optimal site structure for travel site
Hi there, I am seo-managing a travel website where we are going to make a new site structure next year. We have about 4000 pages on the site at the moment. The structure is only 2-levels at the moment: Level 1: Homepage Level 2: All other pages (4000 individual pages - (all with different urls)) We are adding another 2-3 levels, but we have a challenge: We have potentially 2 roads to the same product (e.g. "phuket diving product") domain.com/thailand/activities/diving/phuket-diving-product.asp domain.com/activities/diving/thailand/phuket-diving-product.asp I would very much appreciate your view on the problem: How do I solve this dilemma/challenge from a SEO standpoint? I want to avoid DC if possible, I also only want one landing page - for many reasons. And usability is of course also very important. Best regards, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sembseo0 -
What do I do about sites that copy my content?
I've noticed that there are a number of websites that are copying my content. They are putting the full article on their site, mentioning that it was reposted from my site, but contains no links to me. How should I approach this? What are my rights and should I ask them to remove it or add a link? Will the duplicate content affect me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Am I Doing This Wrong? Ecommerce SEO
I ran my site through the SEOMoz On-Page Optimization tool and one of the problems noted was "Keyword Self-Cannibalization" in this case, it was stating I was using the keyword "Board Games" too much. Site in question: http://theboardgamers.co.uk/ The problem being is that every product link contains the word "Board Game" - Which makes sense, but I guess it may look spammy to the SEO world. Would it be best to remove the "board game" part from each internal link and only leave it in the URL structure?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | REMOVE560