What to call pages
-
I reckon I've bagged one of the most interesting SEO projects of the year. My new client is selling vibrators. The site is not even in development yet but they want to make it fun and friendly and take away the stigma and "seediness" of the product.
Anyway, the owenr has presented a list of "places" within this site which are places where the products are going to be showcased. These are along the lines of, Royal Rabbits Palace, Clitoral Courtyard, Dungeon Dildos, Magical G-arden etc. (there is a bit shreky/fariy tale thing going on)
Clearly, these places add a lot to the look and feel of the site but as URL's and Titles, they are clearly not optimal in an SEO sense.
What is for the best...making sure we shift the owner back into SEO best practice or hope that having these weird and wonderful names for the pages is going to add enough to the user experience to make it worthwhile to let through.
FYI, did you know you can get vibrators that you can plug an ipod into. Man, I've seen some weird things researching this client!
-
Cheers guys. Was hoping for some obscure reason why it would be ok to go with the weird and wonderful names in this instance. Hoping to get some keyword association is a bit too much of a hit and hope I think. Just going to have to be the dull one, as always, in the project and keep things on the straight and narrow. Alex.
-
If the client isn't into SEO and usability (well obviously the client isn't) and insists on keeping the weird names, there are still some places to put the keywords in while still staying on the white hat side. Good places would be the alt tag of the picture. It's even possible in the title e.g. '30" BigBoy Dildo - Magical G-arden | Client.com". I think there's enough space for both ways, SEO and crazy names.
Off topic: and they move according to the music I suppose? What if you're into Death Metal? Health risk?
-
Hi Alex.
The bottom line is your client can present their pages in any manner they desire....unless the deem SEO is important, in which case they will need to adjust to industry best practices.
The page title, header tag and content should focus the keywords or phrases whose traffic the page wishes to attract. If you offer a page titled "Royal Rabbits Palace" with the same phrase as a header, the problem is you are relying on the content alone to let search engines understand the focus of the page. You will wind up attracting traffic for "rabbit" searches, and missing out on traffic for the page's related terms.
The only way I can think of to make this process work is to cause the replacement phrases to be so well known Google associates the phrases with a given keyword. It would be something like if a major motion picture used the phrase and it went viral.
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
-
If a page ranks in the wrong country and is redirected, does that problem pass to the new page?
Hi guys, I'm having a weird problem: A new multilingual site was launched about 2 months ago. It has correct hreflang tags and Geo targetting in GSC for every language version. We redirected some relevant pages (with good PA) from another website of our client's. It turned out that the pages were not ranking in the correct country markets (for example, the en-gb page ranking in the USA). The pages from our site seem to have the same problem. Do you think they inherited it due to the redirects? Is it possible that Google will sort things out over some time, given the fact that the new pages have correct hreflangs? Is there stuff we could do to help ranking in the correct country markets?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ParisChildress1 -
What to do about endless size pages
I'm working on a site that sells products that come in many different sizes. One product may come in 30 sizes.The products themselves are identical, except for the size. There are collections pages that are all of several kinds of product in a particular size and then there are individual product pages of one product the specific size. Collections pages for widgets size 30 is the same content as widgets size 29. A single product page for gold-widget-size-30 is the same content as the single product page gold-widget-size-29. To make matters worse, they all have the same tags and very little written content. The site is in Shopify. Last month there were almost 400 pages that produced visits on organic, mostly in the 1 to 4 per month range, but all together about 1000 visits. There are several hundred more that produced no traffic in organic, but are duplicate (except for size) and part of this giant ball of tangled string. What do you think I should do? Thanks... Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Exact match .org Ecommerce: Reason why internal page is ranking over home page
Hello, We have a new store where an internal category page (our biggest category) is moving up ahead of the home page. What could be the reason for this? It's an exact match .org. Over-optimization? Something else? It happened both when I didn't optimize the home page title tag and when I did for the main keyword, i.e. mainkeyword | mainkeyword.org, or just mainkeyword.org Home Page. Both didn't help with this. We have very few backlinks. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Is it possible we are being penalized for doorway pages?
www.trophycentral.comHi, we were hit very hard a few years ago by Panda and have been try to recover. We completely revamped our site (structure, canonical, duplicates, content, etc.) and had a couple of keywords recover. However, most traffic has not comeback and still cannot be found in the top 30 pages or so for major phrases. We have compared ourselves to major competitors in our industry and see very few differences. The only thing I see as a difference is that many of our products are in multiple sections. For example, we have all baseball awards (trophies, pins, medals) grouped together. We then have just baseball medals together and just baseball pins together. Is this something that could be causing us not to rank? I am asking because the phrases that are ranking are the ones that don't have multiple categories. We have no manual penalties, but now I am thinking this is what Google might consider a doorway page?As an experiment, I just noindexed all but one category for baseball and soccer to see what happens.Does this make sense? Has anyone else seen this?Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
Meta NOINDEX and links into the pages?
If I have internal links pointing to pages that are META NO INDEX, will Google still index them? Or does that only apply to pages that are linked to from an external domain? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Merging your google places page with google plus page.
I have a map listing showing for the keyword junk cars for cash nj. I recently created a new g+ page and requested a merge between the places and the + page. now when you do a search you see the following. Junk Cars For Cash NJ LLC
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | junkcars
junkcarforcashnj.com/
Google+ page - Google+ page the first hyperlink takes me to the about page of the G+ and the second link takes me to the posts section within g+. Is this normal? should i delete the places account where the listing was originally created? Or do i leave it as is? Thanks0 -
What to do if the wrong page is ranking?
What to do if the wrong page of your website is ranking and you cannot 301 it? Apparently an outsourced company the previous manager hired build anchor text links to the homepage, when those links should have been pointing to a deeper page. As a result, the hompage is now ranking for that term. But I think we can convert a lot more of the visitors if the deeper page is there instead. Obviously, I can't 301 the homepage. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrep0 -
Should the sitemap include just menu pages or all pages site wide?
I have a Drupal site that utilizes Solr, with 10 menu pages and about 4,000 pages of content. Redoing a few things and we'll need to revamp the sitemap. Typically I'd jam all pages into a single sitemap and that's it, but post-Panda, should I do anything different?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EricPacifico0