Really bad technical SEO and Nofollow
-
I posted a question week ago about a client with really awful SEO errors to the tune of over 75k violations including massive duplicate content (over 8000 pages) and pages with too many links (homepage alone has over 300 links), and I was thinking, why not try to nofollow the product pages which are the ones causing so many issue. They have super low domain authority, and are wasting spider energy, have no incoming links. Thoughts? BTW the entire site is an ecommerce site wth millions of products and each product is its own wordpress blog post...YIKES! Thoughts?
-
hi,
there are thousands of ecommerce sites with over 200 or 300 links on their home page and they perform pretty well with no fluctuations in their traffic throughout years.
Just a thought.
-
For the record, I've worked on a site with the Yoast plugin that had 260k product "post" items and we showed no duplicate content errors when I left.
-
Oh I guess I should add some other answers - the 75k errors are really every single issue, minor or major according to Microsofts 2007 SEO toolkit - from the MOZ I get over 8000 crawl errors , 31k in warnings and 2k in notices as far as the errors the vast majority is dup page content and for the warnings over 9k are too many links and 3k in overly dynamic urls. The old SEO person I took over from had installed the SEO toolkit I believe - and checked the conical link ad in the notices on the moz I see 1733 of those.
admittedly the technical side of seo is my weakness - surprise surprise, I am sure I am not unique. I can say what to do but how to do it is sometimes hard for me to describe esp in wordpress.
-
Oh I guess I should add some other answers - the 75k errors are really every single issue, minor or major according to Microsofts 2007 SEO toolkit - from the MOZ I get over 8000 crawl errors , 31k in warnings and 2k in notices as far as the errors the vast majority is dup page content and for the warnings over 9k are too many links and 3k in overly dynamic urls. The old SEO person I took over from had installed the SEO toolkit I believe - and checked the conical link ad in the notices on the moz I see 1733 of those.
admittedly the technical side of seo is my weakness - surprise surprise, I am sure I am not unique. I can say what to do but how to do it is sometimes hard for me to describe esp in wordpress.
-
Thanks everyone...and the cononical tagging IMO is the best bet here, and I totally agree that the Yoast plugin looks like the best thing to help with that task but to be honest I am super afraid it will break the website. And yes, no index is what I meant, so meat to say Noindex and follow in the meta tags - and/or using cononical URL priority setting in the meta tags where ever I can.
Migrating is in the plan - I am just impatient and I have been only link building to the homepage in the meantime, but even that is a challenge because obviously I feel like I have to do it 2000 times over to add value.
-
I agree that this may require a migration. Not only will the e-commerce work better for your client, but you'll be able to get things right from the ground up. Or at least more right. All the usual e-commerce platforms have their SEO problems, but it sounds like basically anything would be better than this.
-
Wow....where to begin...
Where are the 75k violations coming from (SEOmoz, Google, etc)?
To you comment: "(homepage alone has over 300 links)"
Google has in it's Webmaster Guidelines that you use around 100 or less links on a given page
To your comment: "each product is its own wordpress blog"
If everything is a Wordpress Post you should be able to canonical all those pages pretty easily. I use the Yoast Plugin for Wordpress SEO. It's amazing what it can do. All you have to do is install it and go to that post and set up the advance portion of the plugin to canonical to the appropriate page.
To your comment: "why not try to nofollow the product pages which are the ones causing so many issue"
This should be resolved with the aforementioned canonical recommendation.
As far as links on a page, I'm a fan of only having links on a page that are are logical or "relevant" next steps for the user. If my page is about baby shampoo, links to shopping cart, contact us and main things are relevant; but so are towels, bathtubs, baby soap, etc. Try to keep the links to a minimum and really try to help the user.
Have you guys submitted your products to Google Product Feed? That may help with traffic too.
I could keep writing for hours but it's a start.
-
Have you considered consolidating the pages? What I mean by that, is if each product has its own wp post then how about sorting it by color, so yellow shirt and blue shirt don't have separate post but one posts with a variation tool within to delineate the colors. Then 301 redirect those old permalinks to the new one? Also, it might be time for a migration like irving weiss said, in which case I would recommend Magento as your eCommerce platform.
-
nofollowing the links won't stop the spiders from finding those pages, that will only throw away your PR. block them out in robots.txt, noindex and/or canonical the duplicate content pages to reign in the number of pages instead.
I would look at the navigational structure and see if you can narrow down the hierarchy a bit if there are 300 links on each page, it's a bit overwhelming for the user. Link to main category pages and on those pages branch out to individual products or sub categories.
"BTW the entire site is an ecommerce site wth millions of products and each product is its own wordpress blog post...YIKES! Thoughts?" I think wordpress is the wrong platform for a large ecommerce site with a million products and a migration might be in order which is a huge undertaking. You must have tons of duplicate title tags and junk on this site, it's inevitable when creating so many pages.
-
Read this post by Matt Cutts on nofollow and pagerank sculpting
Essentially, you still divide your link authority between the total number of links on the page (including nofollowed links) and only pass authority to the followed links.
So you still pass just as much authority to the links that are followed while reducing the authority to the newly nofollowed link (which doesn't fix your situation from what I can tell).
You can possibly noindex the duplicate pages? I'd have to see specifics before I can say for sure.
Best course of action is a navigation restructure (maybe even site if each product is a post (timely)... should at least be a page(timeless)).
Good luck!
Oleg
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
-
Building a National SEO Stratergy
Good morning Mozzers! I've just started working in-house for a local company who want to go national. I want to build a long-term strategy but the competitors all appear to be building short term strategies and I fear this is pushing the company towards following a similar approach. The competitor companies and even my company at present are trying to target "Green Widgets in TownX" and then duplicating the page and switching out TownX with TownY. Naturally there are competitors having success with this, but for how long? I really don't want to go down this route. My aim for a long term strategy would be going after "Green Widgets" and then rank naturally for "Green Widgets in TownX" with our generic green widgets page. Now if I'm told I have to go with the competitor strategy regardless of my concerns, are there any good examples of companies that have done this, without the need for being a huge brand first? I know I can obviously try to create unique content on each page and that will help prevent penalties, but it still seems a short-term strategy? Any words of wisdom would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaulGG1 -
Domain forward to landing page - good or bad for SEO?
Hi Mozzers, Just recently we acquired a domain (www.nhacaribbean.com) for marketing purposes. Our technical staff used a frame forward to redirect the domain to the landing page http://www.nha.nl/alles-over-nha/Caribbean.aspx, which is only linked in the sitemap (not in the navigational structure of the site). Now, I'd personally just redirect the domain with a 301. But our CEO really wanted to keep the domain www.nhacaribbean.com visible in the URL bar. My question is: could this (potentially) really hurt rankings for our web site one way or the other? I'd love to hear from you guys. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NHA_DistanceLearning0 -
Is a dynamic online user list bad for SEO?
Hello everyone, I have a question that is currently puzzling me, and I hope you can help me with. On musicianspage.com (one of our websites), we show a list of online users embedded within the page which, as you may expect, changes all the time according to who's online at that moment. That list appears on every page of the site, so at any time any page on the site has a different content and different link profile (sometimes we have just a few users connected, other times we may have over 50 users connected at the same time). My question is: is such a "dynamical-embedded" list bad, good or neutral from a SEO stand point? If it is bad, what do you suggest to do? Put it inside a frame? Using AJAX? Any thoughts and suggestions are very welcome! Thanks in advance to anyone reading this. All the best, Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Been away for a while is SEO really dead ? I don't think so...
I have been struggling with the google updates but recently we started a new project and by using guest blog posts we were able to achieve a top 3 ranking. It delivered traffic and sales so SEO still works. This is my understanding of the current situation - 1. Generic Keywords (forget it) 2. Go niche and long tail (but thats been the case for a while right) 3. Using related searches 4. Incoming links using brands and a wider range of phrases and urls. 5. Content thats sharable 6. Google plus buttons etc This is my current understanding I would love to hear your thoughts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect0 -
Joomla Plugins for SEO
Any input on which Joomla plugins could help us to facilitate the SEO on a client's site? Wordpress has some simple all-in-ones but we're not as familiar with Joomla and it doesn't look like that's the case. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MackenzieFogelson0 -
Critique My Site For SEO
Hi Everyone, I was wondering if someone might critique my site and let me know what you think. I've done pretty much everything I know to do proper seo for my site. I'd love to hear some critiques about what I am doing wrong. I'm not sure if my titles are okay, being that they are similar amongst pages. The other thing is that for all the javascript buttons on the top I have no followed them since they don't have any anchor text. The way google will crawl my page is through the links in the footer. I was thinking of moving them throughout the body of the page since I hear google isn't giving as much weight to footer links. I also wanted to hear what you think about putting a blog on my site and updating with fresh content as opposed to creating a separate blog and then linking back to my website with anchor text. Thanks for all the help. And glad to be a member Bill
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wsh150 -
SEO Company Referral
I am looking for a great US based SEO company referral. I try to do as much as I can on my end but the more I learn, then more I find I need help to do a great job. Lately running the business takes most of my time, and we need a team who really specializes in SEO. Can anyone recommend a SEO company with a great reputation, someone who has done great work for you in the past? I get many people contacting me with SEO promises, but I need some advice from someone with more experience than me. I appreciate all of your insights.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fertilityhealth0 -
Do interstitials hurt SEO?
If you go to www.homeportfolio.com and click on one of the links in the footer. you'll notice you are presented with an interstitial. Can you tell me if that hurts our SEO and if we lose any link juice or suffer in any other way as a result of this linking method? my main concern is whether having anchor text that says "bathroom ideas" that goes to an interstitial that doesn't mention bathroom ideas is non-relevant... even if it refreshes 12 seconds to a page that is.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KaplanSEM0