Product Listings - is it worth indexing the whole product catalogue?
-
I'm working on a site that has around 500 product listings. This is for a rental company without any sort of ecommerce platform, so, there's no prices, no adding a product to a cart, etc. Also, there are no different sizing / color options for each product, so each product is the canonical version.
After some restructuring, we're starting to see a lot of 404s and just some general mess.
I have a couple of thoughts.
My first is to just noindex each product. We hardly get any direct traffic to an individual product page, and if they land anywhere related to products, it's usually a category page. If I noindex the products, I don't have to worry about the 404s.
My second is to implement the rel=canonical tag on each product to correspond to its primary category. While this is sort of liberal use of the canonical tag, I'm thinking that it could help drive more organic traffic to the category pages.
Does anyone have any insight or thoughts on this? Thank you very much!
-
So that's sort of my initial thought in using the rel=canonical tag for its stated purpose. But I know that Google is pretty liberal with its understanding (say in using rel=canonical for individual events in a series) of user intent.
So my example would be: if I had a gray washtub and a black washtub - two separate products because they have different dimensions, capacities, etc, I would want to point any value back to the category "washtub" where both these products are listed. Do you still think that would be frowned upon?
-
Hi Matt,
As far as I understand your problem, it doesn't seem a good way to use REL Canonical to link products to categories. As it's intended to link a page that is the same to another page which you wouldn't be doing here. What I would recommend is noindexing the page if you're confident that it doesn't provide you with any user intent.
Martijn.
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
-
Blogs Not Getting Indexed Intermittently - Why?
Over the past 5 months many of our clients are having indexing issues for their blog posts.
Technical SEO | | JohnBracamontes
A blog from 5 months ago could be indexed, and a blog from 1 month ago could be indexed but blogs from 4, 3 and 2 months ago aren't indexed. It isn't consistent and there is not commonality across all of these clients that would point to why this is happening. We've checked sitemap, robots, canonical issues, internal linking, combed through Search Console, run Moz reports, run SEM Rush reports (sorry Moz), but can't find anything. We are now manually submitting URLs to be indexed to try and ensure they get into the index. Search console reports for many of the URLs will show that the blog has been fetched and crawled, but not indexed (with no errors). In some cases we find that the blog paginated pages (i.e. blog/page/2 , blog/page/3 , etc.) are getting indexed but not the blogs themselves. There aren't any nofollow tags on the links going to the blogs either. Any ideas? *I've added a screenshot of one of the URL inspection reports from Search Console alt text0 -
Not all images indexed in Google
Hi all, Recently, got an unusual issue with images in Google index. We have more than 1,500 images in our sitemap, but according to Search Console only 273 of those are indexed. If I check Google image search directly, I find more images in index, but still not all of them. For example this post has 28 images and only 17 are indexed in Google image. This is happening to other posts as well. Checked all possible reasons (missing alt, image as background, file size, fetch and render in Search Console), but none of these are relevant in our case. So, everything looks fine, but not all images are in index. Any ideas on this issue? Your feedback is much appreciated, thanks
Technical SEO | | flo_seo1 -
No Index PDFs
Our products have about 4 PDFs a piece, which really inflates our indexed pages. I was wondering if I could add REL=No Index to the PDF's URL? All of the files are on a file server, so they are embedded with links on our product pages. I know I could add a No Follow attribute, but I was wondering if any one knew if the No Index would work the same or if that is even possible. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MonicaOConnor0 -
Duplicate Content - Products
When running a report it says we have lots of duplicate content. We are a e-commerce site that has about 45,000 sku's on the site. Products can be in multiple departments on the site. So the same products can show up on different pages of the site. Because of this the reports show multiple products with duplicate content. Is this an issue with google and site ranking? Is there a way to get around this issue?
Technical SEO | | shoedog1 -
CDN Being Crawled and Indexed by Google
I'm doing a SEO site audit, and I've discovered that the site uses a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that's being crawled and indexed by Google. There are two sub-domains from the CDN that are being crawled and indexed. A small number of organic search visitors have come through these two sub domains. So the CDN based content is out-ranking the root domain, in a small number of cases. It's a huge duplicate content issue (tens of thousands of URLs being crawled) - what's the best way to prevent the crawling and indexing of a CDN like this? Exclude via robots.txt? Additionally, the use of relative canonical tags (instead of absolute) appear to be contributing to this problem as well. As I understand it, these canonical tags are telling the SEs that each sub domain is the "home" of the content/URL. Thanks! Scott
Technical SEO | | Scott-Thomas0 -
Instant Indexing
I've been working on a site for a while now, methodically building content and building trust and authority. Lately I've noticed that anything I publish there appears to be instantly indexed by Google, which surprises me. I haven't had this happen before so I'm curious. I'd be interested to hear the experience of others.
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0 -
Wrong page version in the index
Hi, my site is currently accessible through URL with and without www. The Version with www has 10 times more Backlinks (PA 45 vs 38) but is not listet into the google Index. As far as I know there was never made a google Webmaster account or declared otherwise the version without www to be 'cannonical'. Basically I think that for SEO reasons it would be much better to declare the with www version to be cannonical and redirect the without www version to it. My questions are: Do you have an idea why the with www version is not indexed?
Technical SEO | | Naturalmente
How long does Google usually take to change the version in the index?
Do I risk my site to be thrown out of the index for some days untill the change is made? Thanks in advance.0 -
Is it worth setting up 301 redirects from old products to new products?
This year we are using a new supplier and they have provided us a product database of approx. 5k products. About 80% of these products were in our existing database but once we have installed the new database all the URLs will have changed. There is no quick way to match the old products with the new products so we would have to manually match all 5k products if we were were to setup 301 rules for the old products pointing to the new products. Of course this would take a lot of time. So the options are: 1. Is it worth putting in this effort to make the 301 rules? 2. Or are we okay just to delete the old product pages, let the SE see the 404 and just wait for it to index the new pages? 3. Or, as a compromise, should we 301 the old product page to the new category page as this is a lot quicker for us do do than redirecting to the new product page?
Technical SEO | | indigoclothing0