Ecommerce category pages
-
Hi there,
I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I work on a lot of webshops that are made by the same company. I don't like to say this, but not all of their shops perform great SEO-wise.
They use a filtering system which occasionally creates hundreds to thousands of category pages. Basically what happens is this: A client that sells fashion has a site (www.client.com). They have 'main categories' like 'Men' 'Women', 'Kids', 'Sale'.
So when you click on 'men' in the main navigation, you get www.client.com/men/. Then you can filter on brand, subcategory or color. So you get: www.client.com/men/brand. Basically, the url follows the order in which you filter. So you can also get to 'brand' via 'category': www.client.com/shoes/brand
Obviously, this page has the same content as www.client.com/brand/shoes or even /shoes/brand/black and /men/shoes/brand/black if all the brands' shoes happen to be black and mens' shoes.
Currently this is fixed by a dynamic canonical system that canonicalizes the brand/category combinations. So there can be 8000 url's on the site, which canonicalize to about 4000 url's.
I have a gut feeling that this is still not a good situation for SEO, and I also believe that it would be a lot better to have the filtering system default to a defined order, like /gender/category/brand/color so you don't even need to use these excessive amounts of canonicalization. Because, you can canonicalize the whole bunch, but you'd still offer thousands of useless pages for Google to waste its crawl budget on.
Not to mention the time saved when crawling and analysing using Screaming Frog or other audit tools.
Any opinions on this matter?
-
I love this question, Adriaan. It's one that a lot of people have asked over the years and that a lot of people have had to deal with over time especially with ecommerce sites like those you work on.
As you well know, there are multiple ways to handle duplicate content:
- The way you are proposing, which is moving to a static URL structure that always keeps the same order
- A web of canonicals like you seem to have set up (and it sounds like you have it set up correctly)
- The whack-a-mole approach of periodically looking for duplicate content and implementing redirects, which can lead to further issues with internal redirects. This is not a good scalable option.
SEO is all about processes. If you have a canonical process that is working for you and has been scalable (eg you are not manually specifying the URL for each new category created, which is probably done when the merchandising team or feeds update the site), that works to a certain extent.
However, this is like treating a bunch of cuts on your hands with bandaids but not dealing with the fact that a) you only have so much space on your hands and can only apply so many bandaids, and b) that you're still getting cuts on your hands.
I prefer to deal with the root of the issue, which in your case is that you can have multiple URLs targeting the same terms based on the user's (or Googlebot's!) crawl path on your site. I am assuming that you are only putting the canonicals in your XML and HTML sitemaps, by the way?
If I were you, this is how I would tackle your problem:
-
Make sure you are only putting in the canonical URLs to your XML sitemaps. Start here.
-
Do a full crawl of your site and pull all the URLs that are canonicaling elsewhere. Then get your log files and see how much time the search engines are spending on these canonical'd URLs.
-
Also check to see that Google is indeed respecting all of your canonicals! At this scale of canonicals, I'd expect that they are semi-often not respecting them and you are still dealing with duplicate content issues. But again, that's just a hunch I have.
-
Make a decision from there, off of discussions with your engineers/designers/etc about how much work is involved, about if you think it's worthwhile to make the change.
I am **always **a fan of eliminating pages that are canonical'd and not serving a purpose (example: a PPC landing page might be canonical'd and noindexed, and you don't want to remove that page). My suspicion in your case, as well, is that having /brand/mens won't convert any differently from /mens/brand.
At the end of the day, you need to decide how you want your site organized and if your customers (the people buying things on the site) prefer to shop by brand or by gender/sport/whatever. This will help you decide what way to architect your URLs and your site's flow.
Hope that helps!
John
-
Reducing the number of pages that search engines need to crawl is definitely the right way to go, so yeah I would definitely get a uniform URL structure in place if possible. Reduce that crawl budget
-
Thanks for your response Sean. I do know that the use of canonicals is correct here.
My question though, is if it would be better to reduce the amount of actual pages (introduce a uniform URL structure, so to speak) because this would reduce the amount of pages the Google crawler needs to crawl drastically (over 65% on some of my clients webshops). As far as I know, they do crawl every canonicalized url?
-
It does sound like you're adopting a good approach to canonicals. There are a lot of sites out there that do the same approach with non-uniform URL structures such as the one you're using.
Don't suppose you could supply the URL so I can have a look?
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
-
Google Rich Snippets in E-commerce Category Pages
Hello Best Practice for rich snippets / structured data in ecommerce category pages? I put structured markup in the category pages and it seems to have negatively impacted SEO. Webmaster tools is showing about 2.5:1 products to pages ratio. Should I be putting structured data in category Pages at all? Thanks for your time 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
500 and 508 pages?
Hi we just did a massive deepcrawl (using the tool deepcrawl.co.uk/) on the site: http://tinyurl.com/nu6ww4z http://i.imgur.com/vGmCdHK.jpg Which reported a lot of URLs as either 508 and 500 errors. For the URLs as reported as either 508 or 500 after the deep crawl crawl finished we put them directly into screaming frog and they all came back with status code 200. Could it be because Deep Crawl hammered the site and the server couldn't handle the load or something? Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Awesome Ecommerce category pages
Hi! We are in the process of overhauling our websites, and I am hoping that some of you can post URLs for websites that are ranking well and using lots of creative content to help rank their ecommerce category pages. You can post your own, or others that you admire.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC1 -
410 pages
Do you need to optimize a 410 page like you do for 404 pages? What does a visitor see when a page is 410 compared to a 404?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Facebook page optimization
I'm working with a client who is "under attack" by one unhappy customer. That customer created a Facebook page to share her outrage, and her page is outranking my client's (consistently immediately above his FB page). I've checked all of the obvious things... page name page URL About section, and all business-related data He has MANY more "Likes" than she does, makes posts far more frequently (with much better Engagement), references his company name in almost every Post (as she does), and on and on. My main question is this... are there one or two factors that seem to have the most impact on how a given FB page ranks? Thanks for your help, Moz family! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | measurableROI0 -
Page not appearing in SERPs
I have a regional site that does fairly well for most towns in the area (top 10-20). However, one place that has always done OK and has great content is not anywhere within the first 200. Everything looks OK, canonical link is correct, I can find the page if I search for exact text, there aren't any higher ranking duplicate pages. Any ideas what may have happened and how I can confirm a penalty for example. TIA,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cornwall
Chris0 -
Links to images on a page diluting page value?
We have been doing some testing with additional images on a page. For example, the page here:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter264
http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/files/2550/sukhoi-su-27-flanker-package-for-fsx/ Notice the images under the heading Images/Screenshots After adding these images, we noticed a ranking drop for that page (-27 places) in the SERPS. Could the large amount of images - in particular the links on the images (links to the larger versions) be causing it to dilute the value of the actual page? Any suggestions, advice or opinions will be much appreciated.0 -
Am I Doing This Wrong? Ecommerce SEO
I ran my site through the SEOMoz On-Page Optimization tool and one of the problems noted was "Keyword Self-Cannibalization" in this case, it was stating I was using the keyword "Board Games" too much. Site in question: http://theboardgamers.co.uk/ The problem being is that every product link contains the word "Board Game" - Which makes sense, but I guess it may look spammy to the SEO world. Would it be best to remove the "board game" part from each internal link and only leave it in the URL structure?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | REMOVE560