Query on Site Architecture
-
Hi All,
When I check on my ecommerce site in one of the architecture tool in that my Ecommerce Homepage interlink with 765 pages whereas when I check few competitors and big brands then there homepage linked with 28 pages, 33, 47, 57 etc not like my site 765 pages.
Do I am wrong anywhere? Can you please check the screenshot of mine & one of the competitor's site architecture?
Because as per me site architecture also play good role in google organic ranking.
-
It's not a good or bad thing if you have 27,000 pages that Google has indexed on your site. What's important is, how many of your pages has Google indexed, how many of those are duplicates, and how many of those are unimportant pages?
To find how many of your pages Google has indexed:
- Make sure that you have an XML sitemap that includes EVERY PAGE on your site.
- Submit that to Google Search Console.
- Check back in a day or so, and Google Search Console will show you how many of the pages on your XML sitemap are in their index.
If you only have 5,000 pages on your site, but Google shows that you have 27,000, then you're probably dealing with duplicate pages, or tags that are built by your site and have gotten out of control.
To find out if Google has indexed duplicate versions of your pages:
- Use Google Analytics' Search Channel report (Acquisition All Traffic Channels Organic, then change the Dimension to Landing Page) to download a list of all pages on your site Google or Bing has sent visitors to.
- Create a new column, stripping out portions of the URL that can change without changing the content of the page. Some common offenders:
- Parameters
- Different categories earlier on in the URL
- www vs non-www
- https vs http
- Now, find the duplicates in the "unique" column. I like using the countif function for this.
- For any page that's got duplicates, find a way to fix those! It varies by the problem, but the answer is generally to 301 redirect all versions to one canonical version.
To find out if you have too many tags, because they're autogenerated
- Use an internal tool, like an XML sitemap creator, to figure out how many tags you have
- Compare that to the number of tags actually bringing you traffic
- Check to see if you're creating tag pages that are the same content as your category pages
- Check to see how many tag pages you have with fewer than five products matching - those probably aren't great pages!
Going through these steps should let you know if your site is well optimized - again, it's not the total count that matters!
Good luck!
Kristina
-
There's no magical number of internal links that you want to strive for, though in general, you want to maximize the number of internal links to your homepage and other important pages, and link to the most important pages on your site from your homepage.
I don't want to toot my own horn too much, but I did put together a guide on SEO internal linking (which is really site navigation) a couple of years ago: https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/site-navigation-for-seo/ It still holds up, since site structure is forever.
In case you don't want to dive into that, here's what I'd recommend for internal linking for ecommerce sites:
- Put your logo in the upper right hand corner of every page on your site, and use that to link back to the homepage. It's a really common navigational tactic, and it tells Google what your homepage is (in case it's not simply www.yoursite.com)
- Use a top navigation bar that's on every page. In the top navigation bar, link to your shopping categories.
- Use a side navigation to list subcategories when a visitor is working within a category.
- Make sure to include breadcrumbs when you're on a product page.
- Limit the number of links on any given page to below 200 (bigger sites do more, but that's because they can get away with it)
Really, that should do 99% of the SEO organization you want to do within your site.
Good luck!
Kristina
-
Hi Joe,
In my case when I type "site:websitename.com" in Google search? it is showing 27000 where in rest all competitors 9k, 12k, 15k and 50k + Here I am talking purely for ecommerce site.
What I find is that there category pages are interlinked more i.e. 500+, 600+ etc
Any suggestion?
Thanks!
-
Most of the time, you'll get really high numbers if you have 765 pages in your site and the home page is accessible in the navigation from every page. It's like this for 99.9% of sites, where the home page is accessible from every page.
I think that simply, you have 765 pages on your site, and they only have 28 or 33.
Is that the case when you type "site:websitename.com" in Google search?
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
-
Site not getting indexed by googlebot.
The following question is in regards to http://footeschool.org/. This site is not getting indexed with google(googlebot) This only happens when the user agent is set googlebot. This is a recent issue. We are using DNN as CMS. Are there any suggestion to help resolve this issue?
Technical SEO | | bcmull0 -
Partner Sites
Hi All, Within our company we have a media group that publishes magazines and videos, the sites have footers that link to our shopping site, one of them has 118,459 links to one URL, domain authority 23, and the other 17,726 to seven URLs, domain authority 52, (there are some articles which link organically). My question is are these links because they're from identifiable companies with the same ownership worth keeping or are they detrimental? The site being linked to has a DA of 39 Cheers Stew
Technical SEO | | StewMcG0 -
How is this site doing this?
http://www.meccabingo.com It shows a splash / promotion page yet you check the cache and it's the real homepage, they are doing this so they don't lose rankings but how are they redirecting users to that but Google is caching the real homepage? is it friendly? thanks!!
Technical SEO | | AdiRste0 -
How do you find bad links to your site?
My website has around 900 incoming links and I have a Google 50 penalty that is sitewide. I have been doing research and from what I can see is that the 50 penalty is usually associated with scetchy links. The penalty started last year. I had about 40 related domains to my main site and each had a simple one page site with a link to the main site. (I know I screwed up) I cleaned up all of those links by removing them. The single page site still exist, but they have no links and several of them still rank very well. I also had an outside SEO person that bought a few links. I came clean with Google and told them everything. I gave them all of my sites and that the SEO person had bought links. I gave them full disclosure and removed everything. I have one site that I can't get the link removed from. I have contacted them numerous times to remove the link and I get no response. I am curious if anyone has had a simular experience and how they corrected the situation. Another issue is that my site is "thin" because its an ecommerce affiliate site and full of affiliate links. I work in the costume market. I'm also afraid that I have other bad links pointing to my site. Dooes anyone know of a tool to identify bad links that Google may be penalizing me for at this time. Here is Google's latest denial of my reconsideration request. Dear site owner or webmaster of XXXXXXXXX.com. We received a request from a site owner to reconsider XXXXXXXX.com for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines. In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from XXXXXXXXXX.com may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines. If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en and resubmit your site for reconsideration. If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality
Technical SEO | | tadden0 -
Google and QnA sites
My website has a QnA site - a bit like this one except it's not private to premium members. It is a page with a left colomn for category links and it has a list of recently asked questions, each question is a link to view the full question and answers etc. Does google know this is a QnA ? Or will it say - hey, there are far too many links on this page, tut tut. Is there anything I can do to help it understand what the page is.
Technical SEO | | borderbound0 -
How to turn WP site into Ecom site?
I have a couple of old wordpress sites that are old affiliate blogs. I currently sell products that are on amazon on these sites and sell quite a bit of volume. I have found a source and can afford the inventory to replace Amazon with my own product. So the dilema is how to turn these wordpress sites into ecommerce sites. The thing I am worried most about is that each site gets about 100-200 visitors a day for great buying keywords. I obviously don't want to lose my rankings. What are the options of turning a wordpress site into a store. I am not interested in plugins or some of the other solutions that make the store look very cheap and I would assume horribly convert. If you have inner pages ranking for keywords how does that work? Do the post pages become product pages? So to sum up I guess I am asking, what are the options that are of the higher quality that will also help me keep my rankings? Thanks
Technical SEO | | PEnterprises0 -
What pages of my site does Google rank as the most important?
If I type site:youtube.com into Google, are the results listed by what Google considers to be the most important pages of the site? If I change my sitemap should this order change? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Seaward-Group0