There seems to be something obvious stopping our product pages from being listed in organic results - help!
-
Hello All
Firstly new to SEO MOZ but what a fantastic resource, good work!
I help run a platform at ethical community (dot) com (have phrased it like that so google doesn't pick up this thread hope thats ok).
We seem to have something glaringly obvious with the SEO ability of our product pages. We now have over 7000 products on the site and would like to think we have done a pretty good job in terms of optimisning them, lots of nice keywords, relevant page titles, good internal links, and even recently have reduced the loading speeds a fair amount. We have a sitemap set up feeding in URLS to Google and some of them are now nearly a year old.
The problem, when doing an EXACT google search on a product title the product pages dont show up for the majority of the 7000 products.
HOWEVER.... we get fantastic ranking in google products, and get sales through other areas of the site, which seems even more odd. For example, if you type in "segway" you'll see us ranking on the first page of google in google products, but the product page itself is nowhere to be seen.
For example "DARK CHOCOLATE STRANDS 70G CAKE DECORATION" gets no results on google (aside from google products) when we have this page at OURDOMAIN/eco-shop/food/dark-chocolate-strands-70g-cake-decoration-5592
Can anyone help identify if there is a major bottleneck here our gut feeling is there is one major factor that is causing this.
-
Can stephen/anyone else help with my latest question here?
-
HI Stephen did you manage to look into that new example I gave any further?
-
Thanks for this Stephen - very helpful.
Ajax wise we made some amendments last week which seem to already be having an impact (our pagination on search results had /# links and now they have crawlable urls). Google has already crawled more pages so far. We are going to move away from the ajax search altogether in the next few weeks too.
One thing that still bugs us all is this example: http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=CEBRA+RHASSOUL+ORGANIC+MOROCCAN+LAVA+CLAY This bugs the hell out of us because
a) The product page for this (http://www.ethicalcommunity.com/eco-shop/toiletries-and-cosmetics/cebra-rhassoul-organic-moroccan-lava-clay-8206) IS in the our sitemap
b) It features on our homepage (has done for 1 week at least) so in theory google should have crawled this link by now
c) We get a huge amount of traffic (well, relative, but about 40% of total traffic on sunday) for the term RHASSOUL CLAY. What's annoying is this links to a content piece on the clay but the product itself is nowhere to be seen.Even googling an exact URL to the product page returns nothing, so if google does know about it, its blocking it.
This also would tend to perhaps invalidate the theory that its the search causing all of this problem as actually this product has accessible links from the homepage.
I have a feeling solving this one case would solve the issue for most of the other products on the site.
Any ideas here?
-
I think that navigation issues may well be what trip you up.
http://www.ethicalcommunity.com/eco-shop/buy/Food-and-Drink when I navigate through the product pages, I am not seeing the html changing to reflect the new contents, the html reflects the coffee content of the first page
However when I copy+paste the url directly to page 3 I get the correct html for the products on the page
Ajax isnt my strong point, but you need to aim to give engines access to your products via clear categorisation and pagination. Has your developer considered using a hashbang (#!)?
Here's a SEOmoz post that may help http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-allow-google-to-crawl-ajax-content
Let me know if this is the issue, interested to know
S
-
thanks will do and look forward to it Stephen
-
check your ajax and what happens to your html when your products load. will look more later
-
Also!...
- You touched on slow loading speeds, can you give me something quantifiable here as as far as we know these should be fairly competitive and have run various speeds tests and they seem to come out ok in terms of loading time. Can you back up that statement with some more solidity? Many thanks again
-
RE: 3)..... perhaps I misunderstood here but maybe what you meant by duplicate content was a lot of the content on the pages is "re-used" stuff for example
ETHICAL CREDENTIALS
Click the icons below to learn about this product's ethical credentials.
etc......
is that more what you meant rather than the product descriptions being copied/pasted from other shop site (as only some of the descriptions will be copy/paste jobs)
- Benchmark...
http://www.etsy.com/listing/70625156/waving-leaves-crisp-white-and-lime-green?ref=fp_treasury_2 is a huge benchmark for us in terms of high volume optimised pages (and a similar model to us so one to review for sure). I guess if you break down the elements on that page a lot of the content are individual to the page... is this what you mean?
-
Hi Stephen
Thank you for your feedback here...
-
Stripping the pages down. Thanks for this and a valid comment here, will get our developer to look into what we can strip out to put more focus on the content.
-
That server would appear to be from Woopra which as you may know is a live tracking tool for us to see live site action/pathway analysis etc. We use it quite a lot and have not heard that this could impact the site, do you know otherwise?
-
Duplicate content, I wouldnt say the majority of pages are duplicated, of course some sellers have their own product pages and copy/paste into ours but a lot of them also write them fresh. Even the ones that are writing them fresh are no-where to be seen
I personally think there is another factor influencing this as it still doesnt explain why some of the pages dont come up literally at all with an exact product search (even when searching the URLs)
look forward to hearing further thoughts and thanks again for your time on this.
-
-
http://www.ethicalcommunity.com/eco-shop/coffee/papua-new-guinean-coffee-454g-10261
All these coffee pages look like crappy duplicate content - you have such a tiny percentage of actual content product description vs all the other stuff on the page - on product pages strip out all the extraneous crap and just focus on selling your product
Also the site is very slow for me, run yslow/google page speed optimiser and see what you can improve
Also check woopra-ns.com
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
-
Conditional Noindex for Dynamic Listing Pages?
Hi, We have dynamic listing pages that are sometimes populated and sometimes not populated. They are clinical trial results pages for disease types, some of which don't always have trials open. This means that sometimes the CMS produces a blank page -- pages that are then flagged as thin content. We're considering implementing a conditional noindex -- where the page is indexed only if there are results. However, I'm concerned that this will be confusing to Google and send a negative ranking signal. Any advice would be super helpful. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Making Filtered Search Results Pages Crawlable on an eCommerce Site
Hi Moz Community! Most of the category & sub-category pages on one of our client's ecommerce site are actually filtered internal search results pages. They can configure their CMS for these filtered cat/sub-cat pages to have unique meta titles & meta descriptions, but currently they can't apply custom H1s, URLs or breadcrumbs to filtered pages. We're debating whether 2 out of 5 areas for keyword optimization is enough for Google to crawl these pages and rank them for the keywords they are being optimized for, or if we really need three or more areas covered on these pages as well to make them truly crawlable (i.e. custom H1s, URLs and/or breadcrumbs)…what do you think? Thank you for your time & support, community!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | accpar0 -
Is dynamic pages helps in E commerce SEO?
Whats are the best way to create dynamic pages in eCommerce website having static urls? Or what are other ways to increase/create more pages in websites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
We are switching our CMS local pages from a subdomain approach to a subfolder approach. What's the best way to handle this? Should we redirect every local subdomain page to its new subfolder page?
We are looking to create a new subfolder approach within our website versus our current subdomain approach. How should we go about handling this politely as to not lose everything we've worked on up to this point using the subdomain approach? Do we need to redirect every subdomain URL to the new subfolder page? Our current local pages subdomain set up: stores.websitename.com How we plan on adding our new local subfolder set-up: websitename.com/stores/state/city/storelocation Any and all help is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO.CIC0 -
Putting "noindex" on a page that's in an iframe... what will that mean for the parent page?
If I've got a page that is being called in an iframe, on my homepage, and I don't want that called page to be indexed.... so I put a noindex tag on the called page (but not on the homepage) what might that mean for the homepage? Nothing? Will Google, Bing, Yahoo, or anyone else, potentially see that as a noindex tag on my homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Philip-DiPatrizio0 -
Canonicals: use when page has same listings, but displayed very differently?
Say you have a listing of movies. In that listing, there are 5 different view types. One has the scenes broken out. Another has only the box covers. Two of the views have movie descriptions, but others don't. Still, the listings themselves are the same, and you only want the default view to be indexed. Is it appropriate to use canonicals in this case? The alternative is to noindex the other views, but the site already has rankings and deep links. If Google does see the pages as unique and we apply a canonical, could we be penalized or would they merely ignore it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LahomaManagement0 -
Duplicate Page Title/Content Issues on Product Review Submission Pages
Hi Everyone, I'm very green to SEO. I have a Volusion-based storefront and recently decided to dedicate more time and effort into improving my online presence. Admittedly, I'm mostly a lurker in the Q&A forum but I couldn't find any pre-existing info regarding my situation. It could be out there. But again, I'm a noob... So, in my recent SEOmoz report I noticed that over 1,000 Duplicate Content Errors and Duplicate Page Title Errors have been found since my last crawl. I can see that every error is tied to a product in my inventory - specifically each product page has an option to write a review. It looks like the subsequent page where a visitor can fill out their review is the stem of the problem. All of my products are shown to have the same issue: Duplicate Page Title - Review:New Duplicate Page Content - the form is already partially filled out with the corresponding product My first question - It makes sense that a page containing a submission form would have the same title and content. But why is it being indexed, or crawled (or both for that matter) under every parameter in which it could be accessed (product A, B, C, etc)? My second question (an obvious one) - What can I do to begin to resolve this? As far as I know, I haven't touched this option included in Volusion other than to simply implement it. If I'm missing any key information, please point me in the right direction and I'll respond with any additional relevant information on my end. Many thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DakotahW0 -
Links to images on a page diluting page value?
We have been doing some testing with additional images on a page. For example, the page here:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter264
http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/files/2550/sukhoi-su-27-flanker-package-for-fsx/ Notice the images under the heading Images/Screenshots After adding these images, we noticed a ranking drop for that page (-27 places) in the SERPS. Could the large amount of images - in particular the links on the images (links to the larger versions) be causing it to dilute the value of the actual page? Any suggestions, advice or opinions will be much appreciated.0