How to optimize achor text links on ecommerce category page
-
A category page on an e-commerce sites, containing a list of the products within the category, usually shows the product image above the product text link. If both image and anchor text link to the product page, this would mean that the image is counted as the link in terms of ranking value.
What would be the best way to make the anchor text count in stead of the image? I guess some ways would be:
1. Not making the product image a link
2. Using some kind of link masking / redirecting technique for the image
3. Employing a technical trick to make the anchor text link come first in the code readable by search engines.What would be the easiest way to solve this issue? Or do you believe it's not worth bothering?
-
This pretty much mirrors what I was going to say....
"I can't find an example of how it would be coded (check link above!), but you could look at having a single ahref stemming from the product text, and expand the clickable area to include the image. This would get around your issue, and I've always thought that having multiple links to a single product like that is sub-optimal.
I'm not sure how much added SEO benefit this would have, but all the small things..."
-
Here is a link to an insteresting thread on this topic in the GWT forums: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/1yhb_xcdtZ0
Judging from what top level contributors have said there, linking images and text links pass the same amount of PR, with a very tiny amount of advantage to anchor text for a text link versus anchor text from the image alt text. Ultimately, do what's best for the user. In this case, for e-commerce, I think the image link taking precedence is just fine.
Dana
-
On our category pages we display products like displayed below. It is semantically correct, as all the elements inside the link are inline elements - it would not validate if we had a
in there as that is a block-element. However, in order to be able to style them correctly, we have added "display: block;" in the stylesheet making it easier to work with.
[
Name
Price](link_to_product)
Does anyone know what this setup has of impact on Google picking up anchor text etc.? Technically, we have an image, a name, and a price, where normally only a name is displayed. Is there some way, in which we can specify what should be counted for/valued as the anchor text (in this case )?
Thanks
-
Is this worth the effort or change in design?
Isn't it that google looks at the 1st link on a page?
So if you have 6 products and images this issue would only effect the 1st product seen?
Thanks
Handcrafter
-
You could design your product pages around having the anchored text link appear first, perhaps in an above description or blurb, and once again under the photo.
-
Hi all, i notited this discussion in another question (http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-to-properly-link-to-products-from-category-page)
I answered there with a technical solution, which i also would like to share here.
I made a fiddle about it, what do you think? Is it over optimization, or is it just a nice trick to get only one link, which is really well optimized?
-
Using a no-follow will loose link juice,
-
Firstly, I wondered if there are any news about this discussion...
Secondly, I wondered why it matters.
Is it because Google will consider only the first link from page A to B?
If that is the case (assuming you can't change the look and feel of the site) won't adding nofollow to the image link will solve the problem?Thanks
-
Perhaps add a no follow to the imageand move the link above the image . Currently you might have
you need to make it something like
<a <strong="">rel="nofollow" href="product.php"></a>
-
Just curious, would no-following the image link work?
-
Hi! We're wondering how your project is going, and if you made a decision and can share any results, or if you're sill looking for advice. Thanks!
-
This is unlkely to have too much of an impact on your rankings. I would recommend looking at the top 3 or 5 for your chosen keyword and look at what they're doing. I certainly wouldn't lose any sleep over this, just make sure your images are optimised too and maybe go with #3 if you're really keen to make the change.
-
Thanks Ryan, that's really helpful. Regarding #3: could you still make the anchor text link appear below the image for users, but have it come first in the source code for search engines? Any suggestion for how that would look like in terms of code?
Could you also do this with a block of text that appears at the bottom of the page, but is placed on top in the code? As having static text on the category page is important for SEO, but you might want to have users seeing the products before the text.
-
A very common issue to encounter!
#1: Absolutely not! People click on images.
#2: Too much effort and possibly risky in Google's eyes.
#3: This isn't really a trick. Just update the template that generates the page and move the linked text ahead of the image. Any developer could handle this for you.
Hidden option #4: Have the link enclose both the image and the product name. It may invalidate your markup, but if #3 isn't an option, consider this.
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
-
Sitemap: Linking horizontal pages on a sitemap that has a vertical hierarchy structure
I'm currently in the process of revamping a website and creating a sitemap for it so that all pages get indexed by search engines. The site is divided into two websites that share the same root domain. The marketing site is on example.com and the application is on go.example.com. To get to go.example.com from example.com, you need to go through one of three “action pages”. The action pages are accessed from every page on example.com where we have a CTA button on the site (that’s pretty much every page). These action pages do not link back to any other page on the site though, nor are they a necessary step to navigate to other webpages. These action pages are only viewed when a user is ready to be taken to the application site. My question is, how should these pages be set up in a vertical sitemap since these three pages have a horizontal structure? Any insight would be much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | RallyUp0 -
Will unused/dead pages within my site that is non-linked hurt my seo?
For example my website has mysite.com/randomunusedpage.html No links go into that page from the website but it is published (came with the WP theme). Will that hurt my SEO and should I delete the page or is it harmless? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Marvellous0 -
Anchor Text and over optimization
Hello everyone, I would like to have your expert (hopefully) opinion on one thing: I am working on a specifi page of a pretty big site, and I noticed one thing in particular. This page is linked to from a lots of internal pages (which is ok) but the anchor text used is in most cases the exact keyword they would like to rank for. I know this is not generally a good thing, but I guess they have so many links with that particular anchor because of the breadcrumbs, and this actually makes sense. Now, if this is the case, how could we work this out (if this is an issue)? Or probably this is not an issue since those links don’t carry a lot of SEO weight…don’t know. Thanks for your opinion on this 🙂
Technical SEO | | Bizio1 -
"One Page With Two Links To Same Page; We Counted The First Link" Is this true?
I read this to day http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-one-page-two-links-page-counted-first-link-192718 I thought to myself, yep, thats what I been reading in Moz for years ( pitty Matt could not confirm that still the case for 2014) But reading though the comments Michael Martinez of http://www.seo-theory.com/ pointed out that Mat says "...the last time I checked, was 2009, and back then -- uh, we might, for example, only have selected one of the links from a given page."
Technical SEO | | PaddyDisplays
Which would imply that is does not not mean it always the first link. Michael goes on to say "Back in 2008 when Rand WRONGLY claimed that Google was only counting the first link (I shared results of a test where it passed anchor text from TWO links on the same page)" then goes on to say " In practice the search engine sometimes skipped over links and took anchor text from a second or third link down the page." For me this is significant. I know people that have had "SEO experts" recommend that they should have a blog attached to there e-commence site and post blog posts (with no real interest for readers) with anchor text links to you landing pages. I thought that posting blog post just for anchor text link was a waste of time if you are already linking to the landing page with in a main navigation as google would see that link first. But if Michael is correct then these type of blog posts anchor text link blog posts would have value But who is' right Rand or Michael?0 -
Rel canonical for partner sites - product pages only or also homepage and other key pages?
Hello there Our main site is www.arenaflowers.com. We also run a number of partner sites (eg: http://flowershop.cancerresearchuk.org/). We've relcanonical'd the products on the partner site back to the main (arenaflowers.com) site. eg: http://flowershop.cancerresearchuk.org/flowers/tutti_frutti_es_2013 rel canonicals back to: http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/tutti_frutti_es_2013). My question: Should we also relcanonical the homepage and other key pages on partner sites back to the main arenaflowers website too? The content is similar but not identical. We don't want our partner sites to be outranking the original (as is the case on kw flower delivery for example). (NB this situation may be complicated by the fact we appear to have an unnatural link penalty on af.com (and when we did an upgrade a while back, the af.com site fell out of the index altogether due to some issues with our move to AWS.) We're getting professional SEO advice on this but wondered what the Moz community's thoughts were.. Cheers, Will
Technical SEO | | ArenaFlowers.com0 -
Why is the Page Authority of my product pages so low?
My domain authority is 35 (homepage Page Authority = 45) and my website has been up for years: www.rainchainsdirect.com Most random pages on my site (like this one) have a Page Authority of around 20. However, as a whole, the individual pages of my products rank exceptionally low. Like these: http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/products/copper-channel-link-rain-chain (Page Authority = 1) http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/collections/todays-deals/products/contempo-chain (Page Authority = 1) I was thinking that for whatever reason they have such low authority, that it may explain why these pages rank lower in google for specific searches using my exact product name (in other words, other sites that are piggybacking of my unique products are ranking higher for my product in a specific name search than the original product itself on my site) In any event, I'm trying to get some perspective on why these pages remain with the same non-existent Page Authority. Can anyone help to shed some light on why and what can be done about it? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | csblev0 -
Question about content on ecommerce pages.
Long time ago we hired a seo company to do seo in our website and one of the things they did is that they wrote long text on the category pages of our products. Example here: http://www.theprinterdepo.com/refurbished-printers/wide-format-laser-refurbished-printers Now my marketing person is saying that if its possible to put the text below the items, technically I will find out how to do it, but from your seo experience, is it good or bad? What about if we short those texts to one paragraph only? Thanks
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
SEOMoz Crawl Diagnostic indicates duplicate page content for home page?
My first SEOMoz Crawl Diagnostic report for my website indicates duplicate page content for my home page. It lists the home page URL Page Title and URL twice. How do I go about diagnosing this? Is the problem related to the following code that is in my .htaccess file? (The purpose of the code was to redirect any non "www" backlink referrals to the "www" version of the domain.) RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^whatever.com [NC]
Technical SEO | | Linesides
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.whatever.com/$1 [L,R=301] Should I get rid of the "http" reference in the second line? Related to this is a notice in the "Crawl Notices Found" -- "301 Permanent redirect" which shows my home page title as "http://whatever.com" and shows the redirect address as http://http://www.whatever.com/ I'm guessing this problem is again related to the redirect code I'm using. Also... The report indicates duplicate content for those links that have different parameters added to the URL i.e. http://www.whatever.com?marker=Blah Blah&markerzoom=13 If I set up a canonical reference for the page, will this fix this? Thank you.0