Feedback needed on possible solutions to resolve indexing on ecommerce site
-
I’ve included the scenario and two proposed fixes I’m considering. I’d appreciate any feedback on which fixes people feel are better and why, and/or any potential issues that could be caused by these fixes. Thank you!
Scenario of Problem I’m working on an ecommerce website (built on Magneto) that is having a problem getting product pages indexed by Google (and other search engines). Certain pages, like the ones I’ve included below, aren’t being indexed. I believe this is because of the way the site is configured in terms of internal linking. The site structure forces certain pages to be linked very deeply, therefore the only way for Googlebot to get to these pages is through a pagination page (such as www.acme.com/page?p=3). In addition, the link on the pagination page is really deep; generally there are more than 125 links on the page ahead of this link.
One of the Pages that Google isn’t indexing: http://www.getpaper.com/find-paper/engineering-paper/bond-20-lb/430-20-lb-laser-bond-22-x-650-1-roll.html
This page is linked from http://www.getpaper.com/find-paper/engineering-paper/bond-20-lb?p=5, and it is the 147<sup>th</sup> link in the source code.
Potential Fixes Fix One: Add navigation tags to the template so that search engines will spend less time crawling them and will get to the deeper pages, such as the one mentioned above. Note: the navigation tags are for HTML-5; however, the Magento site in which this is built does not use HTML 5.
Fix Two: Revised the Templates and CSS so that the main navigation and the sidebar navigation is on the bottom of the page rather than the top. This would put the links to the product pages in the source code ahead of the navigation links.
-
Thanks Matthew, while I am aware of duplicate content on this site, I wasn't aware it it specific to some of the pages that aren't being indexed. I will do more research on this!
-
Hey,
It looks like you might have a duplicate content problem contributing here. For instance, you linked to: http://www.getpaper.com/find-paper/engineering-paper/bond-20-lb/430-20-lb-laser-bond-22-x-650-1-roll.html
And there is this duplicated page, that doesn't have the category directory structure for the URL.
http://www.getpaper.com/430-20-lb-laser-bond-22-x-650-1-roll.htmlThat duplicated page is indexed by Google. It also looks like the duplicated page is what is listed in your XML sitemap, not the page you have linked to from the paginated pages.
In spot checking some of the other product pages, it looks like there is a similar issue going on. I'd recommend altering your XML sitemap to reference the URL you want indexed. Or, since it looks like Google has already indexed the pages on your XML sitemap (some of them, at least), you may want to use the URLs that have been indexed (the ones without the category structure) instead of the URLs with the category structure.
In terms of your possible fixes, I think fix one makes more sense. The more direct links you can add to deeper pages of your site, the better. On fix two, moving the sidebar and header to the bottom of the code and controlling the design with CSS can present some problems in various browsers...in my experience, it usually is more pain than gain.
I hope that helps. Thanks!
Matthew
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
-
Redirecting old html site to new wordpress site
Hi I'm currently updating an old (8 years old) html site to wordpress and about a month ago I redirected some url's to the new site (which is in a directory) like this... Redirect 301 /article1.htm http://mysite.net/wordpress/article1/
Technical SEO | | briandee
Redirect 301 /article2.htm http://mysite.net/wordpress/article2/
Redirect 301 /article3.htm http://mysite.net/wordpress/article3/ Google has indexed these new url's and they are showing in search results. I'm almost finished the new version of site and it is currently in a directory /wordpress I intend to move all the files from the directory to the root so new url when this is done will be http://mysite.net/article1/ etc My question is - what to I do about the redirects which are in place - do I delete them and replace with something like this? Redirect 301 /wordpress/article1/ http://mysite.net/article1/
Redirect 301 /wordpress/article2/ http://mysite.net/article2/
Redirect 301 /wordpress/article3/ http://mysite.net/article3/ Appreciate any help with this0 -
Responsive Site - Is restivejs a solution?
Hi Due to us having a very large site and not enough time to implement changes for the google update on the 21st April I wanted to know if anyone has any understanding of http://restivejs.com/ Is this a way of being ready for the update? And if so what are the limitations/disadvantages? thanks E
Technical SEO | | Direct_Ram0 -
Why are my webpages not getting indexed?
I want to figure out why a lot of my pages for my website are not getting indexed by google. I have installed the SEO plugin by Yoast to my wordpress website. Under the titles and meta section of the plugin options I have set categories and tags to noindex. In WMT, google is saying that all my category pages and most of my tag pages are not being indexed. I want to make sure that the reason these pages are not being indexed are because of the SEO plugin. I want to prevent duplicate content so that is the reason I have set my categories and tags to noindex. Please respond if you know the absolute answer, its very important that I have my website indexed the proper way I want it to.
Technical SEO | | Dino640 -
Discontinued Product on a Ecommerce site
To create a better customer experience, rather then remove discontinued product from a site, we remove many links from the page, and remove it from the navigation of the site, but we keep the url and show that the product can no longer be purchased. This keeps the links, keeps the content, and gives customers the opportunity to find other products we have. But I often wonder if we should allow this items to just 404 and be done with them. Here is an example. http://www.americanmusical.com/Item--i-dyn-bm5a-list. Any advice?
Technical SEO | | dianeb1520 -
Yoast settings for ecommerce site
Hello, I can't find the answer anywhere so I wonder if someone here could help? The ecommerce site I have has Yoast and Woocommerce installed. The Post Types tab under Titles and Metas has various options: Posts, pages, media, products, gift cards. There is also custom post type archives for products and gift cards. Should i noindex the media and also the custom post type archives for product and gift cards and if so why? What about the taxonomies for ecommerce? What's best practise? Noindex? I understand the settings for Yoast when its not an ecommerce site but this has kind of thrown me. Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
Site Migration Questions
Hello everyone, We are in the process of going from a .net to a .com and we have also done a complete site redesign as well as refreshed all of our content. I know it is generally ideal to not do all of this at once but I have no control over that part. I have a few questions and would like any input on avoiding losing rankings and traffic. One of my first concerns is that we have done away with some of our higher ranking pages and combined them into one parallax scrolling page. Basically, instead of having a product page for each product they are now all on one page. This of course has made some difficulty because search terms we were using for the individual pages no longer apply. My next concern is that we are adding keywords to the ends of our urls in attempt to raise rankings. So an example: website.com/product/product-name/keywords-for-product if a customer deletes keywords-for-product they end up being re-directed back to the page again. Since the keywords cannot be removed is a redirect the best way to handle this? Would a canonical tag be better? I'm trying to avoid duplicate content since my request to remove the keywords in urls was denied. Also when a customer deletes everything but website.com/product/ it goes to the home page and the url turns to website.com/product/#. Will those pages with # at the end be indexed separately or does google ignore that? Lastly, how can I determine what kind of loss in traffic we are looking at upon launch? I know some is to be expected but I want to avoid it as much as I can so any advice for this migration would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Sika220 -
Pager + SEO - Is it possible?
Hi, I am having this issue. I know that pager are not friends with SEO, but I want to know which is the best to do in this situations. for example, I work in a news company, and I have a lot of news pages that are very extensive so I use a pager. Well here I have the problem. suppose that the url is www.mysite.com/news/id/here-comes-the-title When you enter that URL you are viewing the first page that has this meta: title keywords description Now, the problem comes when the user goes to the page 2 of this news article. What I shall do? 1- Change the url to www.mysite.com/news/id/here-comes-the-title-PAGE2 www.mysite.com/news/PAGE2-id/here-comes-the-title www.mysite.com/news/id/PAGE2/here-comes-the-title 2- in the page 2,3,4,5 ... add a meta robot noindex? In the option 2 I think that I am loosing the opportunity to index the body of my article. Is this correct? Thanks
Technical SEO | | informatica8100 -
Trying to get google to know my site is a magazine site is this wrong
Hi, i have put a line to describe what my site is at the top of my site and i want to know if this is wrong or not. We have dropped frok being number one in google for lifestyle magazine to now number seven. Before we had to redo our site we were number one and then we dropepd to around number four when we finished the site and now we are number seven and i need to try and get back up there. To help google know we are a lifestyle magazine i have put a line at the top of the site and i want to know if this looks out of place and if i should take it down. i need advice on how to get google to know we are a lifestyle magazine and get back in the top five of google my site is www.in2town.co.uk any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860