Page HTML great for humans, but seems to be very bad for bots?
-
We recently switched platforms and use Joomla for our website. Our product page underwent a huge transformation and it seems to be user friendly for a human, but when you look at one of our product pages in SEOBrowser it seems that we are doing a horrible job optimizing the page and our html almost makes us look spammy.
Here is an example or a product page on our site:
http://urbanitystudios.com/custom-invitations-and-announcements/shop-by-event/cocktail/beer-mug
And, if you take a look in something like SEObrowser, it makes us look not so good.
For example, all of our footer and header links show up. Our color picker is a bunch of pngs (over 60 to be exact), our tabs are the same (except for product description and reviews) on every single product page...
In thinking about the bots:
1-How do we handle all of the links from footer, header and the same content in the tabs
2-How do we signal to them that all that is important on the page is the description of the product?
3-We installed schema for price and product image, etc but can we take it further?
4-How do we handle the "attribute" section (i.e. our color picker, our text input, etc).
Any clarification I need to provide, please let me know.
-
out of curiosity, what did you think this page was for? thanks for your insight.
-
Just being honest....
I had absolutely no idea that this was a page for designing an invitation. None at all - until I read your reply.
If this was my site I would not allow a cool color picker or a coding challenge or whatever to compromise my success by pushing the description down under. I would find a way to make it work because I bet this will kill the conversion rate.
It's easier to double your income from current traffic that it is to double your traffic.
-
Hi EGOL,
Completely agree on beefing up the content as well as making the product name more relevant. We have run into cannibalization issues before so we have made our product names less competitive with our category pages and are working on making the page titles incredibly relevant (so we haven't done this yet, but Beer Mug Party Invitation) would be an example of what we'll change the page title to.
We struggle with bringing product description above the fold because the call to action is to play with the colors and see how customizable, flexible our products really are. We don't want folks to miss that by first seeing the product description.
As far as our HTML of the page, however, what are your thoughts on that. You'll see that the color picker (for example) pulls 66 pngs right in a row with a bunch of random numbers...tells the bot nothing of the page. However, that is how the code is built to make the interface work.
-
First I would try to serve visitors by getting the product description up above the fold and immediately visible by the people who visit the website.
Second, I would expand the title tag because "Beer Mug" puts you into generic competition when you want to compete for easier SERPs such as "custom printed beer mug" (or appropriate language for your product).
Third, your description is really really short. I honestly believe that it has a very good chance of being filtered for trivial content. So, I would take my most important product first and start beefing up the description. As you do that you will add more relevant words to the page so in addition to making your content above trivial you will be qalifying for long tail traffic. Another benefit is that it adds sales appeal and reduces the number of questions that come in by email and phone.
At my office we spend lots of time improving trival content. I spend a hundred hours a month on that. Taking twenty word pages with one image and improving them to 200 word pages with four images. That is for retail pages. Informative pages go up to over a thousand words eight images and a video. (those numbers are just examples - we don't have word count goals). The payback in traffic can be very high if you are in a busy niche and have a site with a little authority.
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
-
Should I apply Canonical Links from my Landing Pages to Core Website Pages?
I am working on an SEO project for the website: https://wave.com.au/ There are some core website pages, which we want to target for organic traffic, like this one: https://wave.com.au/doctors/medical-specialties/anaesthetist-jobs/ Then we have basically have another version that is set up as a landing page and used for CPC campaigns. https://wave.com.au/anaesthetists/ Essentially, my question is should I apply canonical links from the landing page versions to the core website pages (especially if I know they are only utilising them for CPC campaigns) so as to push link equity/juice across? Here is the GA data from January 1 - April 30, 2019 (Behavior > Site Content > All Pages😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wavelength_International0 -
Exact match .org Ecommerce: Reason why internal page is ranking over home page
Hello, We have a new store where an internal category page (our biggest category) is moving up ahead of the home page. What could be the reason for this? It's an exact match .org. Over-optimization? Something else? It happened both when I didn't optimize the home page title tag and when I did for the main keyword, i.e. mainkeyword | mainkeyword.org, or just mainkeyword.org Home Page. Both didn't help with this. We have very few backlinks. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Category Pages
I'm debating on what the best category structure is for a recipe website and was looking to get some advice. It's a recipe/travel/health fitness blog but recipes reign on the site. Should it be: Option A website name\recipe\type of recipe\URL of specific recipe or Option B website name\type of recipe\url of specific recipe (and just cut out the 'recipe' category name) Any advise would be appreciated! Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich-DC0 -
Would it work to place H1 (or important page keywords) at the top of your page in HTML and move lower on page with CSS?
I understand that the H1 tag is no longer heavily correlated with stronger ranking signals but it is more important that Keywords or keyphrases are at the top of a page. My question is, if I just put my important keyword (or H1) toward the top of my page in the HTML and move it towards the middle/lower portion with css position elements, will this still be viewed by Googlebot as important keywords toward the top of my page? QCaxMHL
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
Links on page
Hi I have a web page which lists about 50-60 products which links out to either a pdf on the product or the main manufacturers website page containing product detail. The site in non e-commerce is this the site/page likely to get hit by Penguin? Would it be best to create a separate page for the product/manufacturer group i.e 5 or 6 pages but linking out to the PDFs etc...?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
HELP! How do I get Google to value one page over another (older) page that is ranking?
So I have a tactical question and I need mozzers. I'll use widgets as an example: 1- My company used to sell widgets exclusively and we built thousands of useful, branded unique pages that sell widgets. We have thousands of pages that are ranking for widgets.com/brand-widgets-for-sale. (These pages have been live for almost 2 years) 2- We've shifted our focus to now renting widgets. We have about 100 pages focused on renting the same branded widgets. These pages have unique content and photos and can be found at widgets.com/brand-widgets-for-rent. (These pages have been live for about 2-3 months) The problem is that when someone searches just for the brand name, the "for sale" pages dramatically outrank the "for rent" pages. Instead, I want them to find the "for rent" page. I don't want to redirect traffic from the "for sale" pages because someone might still be interested in buying (although as a company, we are super focused on renting). Solutions? "nofollow" the "for sale" pages with the idea that Google will stop indexing "for sale" and start valuing "for rent" over it? Remove "for sale" from sitemap. Help!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vacatia_SEO0 -
Google Generating its Own Page Titles
Hi There I have a question regarding Google generating its own page titles for some of the pages on my website. I know that Google sometimes takes your H1 tag and uses it as a page title, however, can anyone tell me how I can stop this from happening? Is there a meta tag I can use, for example like the NOODP tag? Or do I have to change my page title? Thanks Sadie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dancape0 -
Are dropdown menus bad for SEO
I have an ecommerce shop here: http://m00.biz/UHuGGC I've added a submenu for each major category and subcategory of items for sale. There are over 60 categories on that submenu. I've heard that loading this (and the number of links) before the content is very bad for SEO. Some will place the menu below the content and use absolute positioning to put the menu where it currently is now. It's a bit ridiculous in doing things backwards and wondering if search engines really don't understand. So the question is twofold: (1) Are the links better in a bottom loading sidemenu where they are now? (2) Given the number of links (about 80 in total with all categories and subcategories), is it bad to have the sidemenu show the subcategories which, in this instance, are somewhat important? Should I just go for the drilldown, e.g. show only categories and then show subcategories after? Truth is that users probably would prefer the dropdown with all the categories and second level subcategories, despite the link number and placement.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | attorney1