Proper structure for site with multiple catagories of same products
-
Hi, we have products (trophies and awards) that can be catagorized in many ways. Using Award Medals as an example: - Medals by type: 1 1/2", 2", etc. - Medals by sport Baseball, Basketball, Cheer - Medals by Style Color, Gold, Silver, Bronze Right now, we have an Award Medals section off of our home page. The section has a decent page rank, but should be much better (I think). My guess is that we are loosing page range since we have separate sections with the groups above as we want our customers to be able to find the medals easily. Unfortunately, when we setup our site 10 years ago, we organized by type and this is what is hanging off the home page. The other groupings we added more recently. I have attached a snap shot of what the sections look like. We would like customers to find an individual medal when they do a Google search. For example a search for Baseball Medals. In Goggle, they likely would not search for 1 1/2" medals. My question is this: Can we keep the same structure we have today (to enable customer flexibility) but improve page rank and also have the sections like basball medals rank well? I have thought about using canonical tags, but the pages are not the same - in one case it is all baseball medals, in another it is all 1 1/2" medals, etc. Thanks for your help!!
-
Thanks, Alan, I understand now...
-
a 301 redirect is a server level or site level command to a web browser to jump to the page the redirect is pointing to. A canonical tag within a page is only a signal to a search engine to not count / index this page, but count/index the page in the canonical tag.
-
Thanks, Alan. This makes sense. One question on #3 - the 301 redirect:
Assume I have a page, say medals1 and aonther page medals2 - both with similar and essentially pointing to many of the same products.
If I do a 301 redirect from medals2 to medals1, is that only an instruction to the search engines, or will someone on my site on the medals2 page see something different?
Thank!
-
I get this same issue a lot - just about or nearly every time I'm hired to perform a forensic audit on an ecommerce site...
Here's how I responded in one of my recent audits to this question:
Search engines struggle to then determine “which of these two nearly identical pages is the original source, which is more authoritative, and which is merely an attempt to own two positions in search results for the same company.
Sometimes search engines overcome that struggle in a positive way, other times their automated systems fail miserably. More often than not, on an initial look, you don’t even realize how much of a problem it is if you think you’re doing well in your organic search based visits.
In reality, every page that competes with every other page results in a cannibalization effect. Every page suffers, at least a little, and cumulatively, entire sites suffer way more than you might even comprehend.
Solutions for consideration:
-
Keep all copies of each product but make them unique. If they are kept, every version or instance of a product needs to have its content completely re-written so that it is truly unique compared to every other instance.
-
Keep all copies of each product but decide which ones you want the search engines to find and rank - every other version should be blocked from indexing. Do not rely on Google to figure out which to keep and which to rank and which to not.
-
Eliminate as many copies as possible by considering consolidation of products detail pages while maintaining access to them from multiple categories. 301 Redirect all copies of every version of those product details pages except the primary one you intend to keep indexed and ranked in search engines.
There's a lot more to consider such as canonical implementation, however in addition to the issue with canonical you already described, the fact is that canonical tags are only signals. they are NOT directives, so that's relying on Google to figure it out.
-
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
-
White listing a site
A new clients site is blocked by a lot of Firewalls. And I can't work out why, the content is family friendly they sell nursery equipment. I've run it through the Google checker and there is no malicious software found on the site. Can anyone tell me what I need to do to get this site unblocked? The url is http://knuma.co.uk/
Technical SEO | | Marketing_Optimist0 -
Received A Notice Regarding Spammy Structured Data. But we don't have any structured data or do we?
Got a message that we have spammy structured data on our site via webmaster tools and have no idea what they are referring to. We do not use any structured data using schema.org mark up. Could they be referring to something else? The message was: To: Webmaster of <a>http://www.lulus.com/</a>, Google has detected structured markup on some of your pages that violates our structured data quality guidelines. In order to ensure quality search results for users, we display rich search results only for content that uses markup that conforms to our quality guidelines. This manual action has been applied to lulus.com/ . We suggest that you fix your markup and file a reconsideration request. Once we determine that the markup on the pages is compliant with our guidelines, we will remove this manual action. What could we be showing them that would be interpreted as structured data, and or spammy structured data?
Technical SEO | | KentH0 -
Website SEO Product Pages - Condense Product Pages
We are managing a website that has seen consistently dropping rankings over the last 2 years (http://www.independence-bunting.com/). Our long term strategy has been purely content-based and is of high quality, but isn’t seeing the desired results. It is an ecommerce site that has a lot of pages, most of which are category or product pages. Many of the product pages have duplicate or thin content, which we currently see as one of the primary reasons for the ranking drops.The website has many individual products which have the same fabric and size options, but have different designs. So it is difficult to write valuable content that differs between several products that have similar designs. Right now each of the different designs has its own product page. We have a dilemma, because our options are:A.Combine similar designs of the product into one product page where the customer must choose a design, a fabric, and a size before checking out. This way we can have valuable content and don’t have to duplicate that content on other pages or try to find more to say about something that there really isn’t anything else to say about. However, this process will remove between 50% and 70% of the pages on the website. We know number of indexed pages is important to search engines and if they suddenly see that half of our pages are gone, we may cause more negative effects despite the fact that we are in fact aiming to provide more value to the user, rather than less.B.Leave the product pages alone and try to write more valuable content for each product page, which will be difficult because there really isn’t that much more to say, or more valuable ways to say it. This is the “safe” option as it means that our negative potential impact is reduced but we won’t necessarily see much positive trending either. C.Test solution A on a small percentage of the product categories to see any impact over the next several months before making sitewide updates to the product pages if we see positive impact, or revert to the old way if we see negative impact.Any sound advice would be of incredible value at this point, as the work we are doing isn’t having the desired effects and we are seeing consistent dropping rankings at this point.Any information would be greatly appreciated. Thank you,
Technical SEO | | Ed-iOVA0 -
How to find all the links to my site
hi i have been trying to find all the links that i have to my site http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk but i am not having any luck. I have used the open explorer but it is not showing all the links but when i go to my google webmaster page it shows me more pages than it does on the semoz tool. can anyone help me sort this out and find out exactly what links are going into my site many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Best URL Structure for Product Pages?
I am happy with my URLs and my ecommerce site ranks well over all, but I have a question about product URL's. Specifically when the products have multiple attributes such as "color". I use a header URL in order to present the 'style' of products, www.americanmusical.com/Item--i-GIB-LPCCT-LIST and I allow each 'color' to have it's own URL so people can send or bookmark a specific item. www.americanmusical.com/Item--i-GIB-LPCCT-ANCH1 www.americanmusical.com/Item--i-GIB-LPCCT-WRCH1 I use a rel canonical to show that the header URL is the URL search engines should be indexing and to avoid duplicate content issues from having the exact same info, MP3's, PDF's, Video's accessories, etc on each specific item URL. I also have a 'noindex no follow' on the specific item URL. These header URLs rank well, but when using tools like SEOMoz, which I love, my header pages fail for using rel canonical and 'noindex no follow' I've considered only having the header URL, but I like the idea of shoppers being able to get to the specific product URL. Do I need the no index no follow? Do I even need the rel canonical? Any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | dianeb1520 -
How should I structure a site with multiple addresses to optimize for local search??
Here's the setup: We have a website, www.laptopmd.com, and we're ranking quite well in our geographic target area. The site is chock-full of local keywords, has the address properly marked up, html5 and schema.org compliant, near the top of the page, etc. It's all working quite well, but we're looking to expand to two more locations, and we're terrified that adding more addresses and playing with our current set-up will wreak havoc with our local search results, which we quite frankly currently rock. My question is 1)when it comes time to doing sub-pages for the new locations, should we strip the location information from the main site and put up local pages for each location in subfolders? 1a) should we use subdomains instead of subfolders to keep Google from becoming confused? Should we consider simply starting identically branded pages for the individual locations and hope that exact-match location-based urls will make up for the hit for duplicate content and will overcome the difficulty of building a brand from multiple pages? I've tried to look for examples of businesses that have tried to do what we're doing, but all the advice has been about organic search, which i already have the answer to. I haven't been able to really find a good example of a small business with multiple locations AND good rankings for each location. Should this serve as a warning to me?
Technical SEO | | LMDNYC0 -
Will training videos available on the "members only" section of a site contribute to the sites ranking?
Hello, I got asked a question recently as to whether training videos on the deeper pages of a website (that you can only access if you are a member and log in) will help with the sites ranking. On the SEOMoz software these deeper pages have been crawled as far as I can tell with errors reported on pages from the "members only" section of the site, leading me to believe the members only pages and their content will contribute to the sites overall ranking profile. I have suggested uploading the informational videos on the main pages of the site for now, making them accessible to all visitors and putting them in a more obvious place to encourage more sharing and views, however I've also said I would check it out with some experts so any information will be greatly appreciated! Many thanks 🙂 Charlotte
Technical SEO | | CharlotteWaller0 -
Recently revamped site structure - now not even ranking for brand name, but lots of content - what happened? (Yup, the site has been crawled a few times since) Any ideas? Did I make a classic mistake? Any advise appreciated :)
I've completely disappeared off Google - what happened? Even my brand name keyword does not bring up my website - I feel lost, confused and baffled on what my next steps should be. ANY advice would be welcome, since there's no going back to the way the site was set up.
Technical SEO | | JeanieWalker0