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Category: Web Design

Talk through the latest in web design and development trends.


  • Our B2B site has a lot of of long form content (e.g., transcriptions from presentations and webinars). We'd like to leverage the long tail SEO traffic driven to these pages and convert those visitors to leads. Essentially, we'd like Google to index all this lengthy, keyword-rich content AND we'd like to put up a read gate that requires users to register before viewing the full article. This is a B2B site, and the goal is to generate leads. Some considerations and questions: How much of the content to share before requiring registration? Ask too soon and it's a terrible user experience, give too much away and our business objectives are not met. Design-wise, what are good ways to do this? I notice Moz uses a "teaser" to block Mozinar content, and I've seen modals and blur bars on other sites. Any gotchas that Google doesn't like that we should be aware of? Trying to avoid anything that might seem like cloaking. Is it better to split the content across several pages (split a 10K word doc across 10 URLs and include a read gate on each) or keep to one page? Thank you!

    | Allie_Williams
    0

  • So we have a site ThePowerBoard.com and it has some pretty impressive links pointing back to it. It is obviously optimized for the keyword "Powerboard", but in no way is it even in the top 10 pages of Google ranking. If you site:thepowerboard.com the site, and/or Google just the URL thepowerboard.com you will see that it populates in the search results. However if you quote search just the title of the home page, you will see oddly that the domain doesn't show up rather at the bottom of the results you will see where Google places "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 7 already displayed". If you click on the link below that, then the site shows up toward the bottom of those results. Is this the case of duplicate content? Also from the developer that built the site said the following: "The domain name is www.thepowerboard.com and it is on a shared server in a folder named thehoverboard.com. This has caused issues trying to ssh into the server which forces us to ssh into it via it’s ip address rather than by domain name. So I think it may also be causing your search bot indexing problem. Again, I am only speculating at this point. The folder name difference is the only thing different between this site and any other site that we have set up." (Would this be the culprit? Looking for some expert advice as it makes no sense to us why this domain isn't ranking?

    | izepper
    0

  • Some friends of mine are having their site redesigned. The designer is using Webflow, which appears to be a visual drag-and-drop designer. Has anyone come across Webflow before? How is it for SEO? I'm not typically pleased with visual designers for SEO, but maybe somebody's had experience and thinks it's fine.

    | justin-brock
    0

  • While working through a series of crawl reports and competitive insights for a site, I noticed one of the competitors had switched from a WWW-version to a wwwP-version. Looking back at the snapshot I took of this during the same time period in 2014, I noticed a significant drop in PA/DA by 20+/-. I'm curious to know if anybody else has experienced something similar, and if anybody can provide insights on why a change like this would even be made? I'll preface it with, everything we could see that this competitor was doing from the outside, was legitimate and propelling them in a positive direction.

    | dodgejd
    0

  • I think there is an issue with this website I'm working on here is the URL: http://brownieairservice.com/ In Google Webmaster tools I am seeing this in the Robots.txt tester: User-agent: *
    Crawl-delay: 1
    Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
    Disallow: /wp-admin/ Also when I look at "blocked resources" in the webmaster tools this is showing to be blocked: http://brownieairservice.com/wp-content/plugins/contact-form-7/includes/js/jquery.form.min.js?ver=3.51.0-2014.06.20It looks like the form plug in is giving the issues but I don't understand this. There are no site errors or URL errors so I don't understand what this crawl delay means or how to fix it.  Any input would be greatly appreciated.  Thank you

    | SOM24
    0

  • Hi,
    We have recently implemented the rel=next and rel=prev meta tags on the 
    category pages of our website. Currently for example if on page 2 we have the following: href="http://www.rococlothing.co.uk/boys/boys-suits/" />
    href="http://www.rococlothing.co.uk/boys/boys-suits/?p=1" />
    href="http://www.rococlothing.co.uk/boys/boys-suits/?p=3" /> For each page we are using the same canonical tag which is the url for 
    the 1st page in the category.
    Is this the correct way to impletment it or should the canonical tag for 
    page 2 be as follows: href="http://www.rococlothing.co.uk/boys/boys-suits/?p=2" /> I have also seen some companies ommiting the canonical tag on pages 
    after page 1 and just using the prev and nexts. Could anyone advise as to what the ideal implementation would be for this? Regards
    Patrick

    | RocoClothing
    0

  • Our homepage navigation uses anchor tags (?TabNumb=1#, ?TabNumb=1# etc) rather than directly linking to different pages to decrease load time (and simplify the build process I owuld imagine).  These anchor links are showing up as duplicate titles in Moz. I am pretty sure if I were to use noindex or rel tags, that could have a negative affect on my search results.  Any way to tackle this outside of a complete redesign of the structure? http://www.dedoose.com/about-us/?TabNum=2# as an example

    | sbnjl
    0

  • Hi friends, I know this is a minor technical change, but we are in an extremely competitive market and I don't want to have any points against us. On our WordPress Category pages i.e. http://www.domain.com/category/�tegory-title%/ I looked at the code behind the the Title of the category page, which is "Browsing: %Category Title%" The code is an h2. I look at the posts in the category archive below, and those are also h2's. The theme preview is here and you can click on Entertainment - Reviews to see exactly what I'm referring to - http://themeforest.net/item/smartmag-responsive-retina-wordpress-magazine/full_screen_preview/6652608 I changed the code for the "Browsing: %Category Title%" to h1, which I believe is more consistent and standard formatting. 1. Is this a correct technical on-page optimization? 2. Would it be beneficial to remove "Browsing"?

    | JustinMurray
    0

  • I am using Genesis Framework with the New Pro child theme on my site called Learn Internet Grow and when I create long articles I like to have a menu so readers can jump to a specific section. I wonder if there is a best practice for how to create jump links quickly without having to switch between the code editor and the post editor. There are a bunch of plugins but I am wary of adding more. Maybe if someone can tell me about one they had a good experience with. Ideally, a resource that shows you how to create a custom plugin for this or a non-plugin way to alter the framework to enable easy jump linking.

    | LearnInternetGrow
    0

  • Hi Just wanting to see what peoples view is on Parallax websites (all content on 1 page separated into sections), and does Google see them as a good user experience or would they be seen as difficult to read for a search engine i.e not enough content?

    | Cocoonfxmedia
    0

  • I have a Wordpress website with well over 1000 posts. I had a SEO audit done and it was highlighted that every post had clickable images. If you click the image a new webpage opens containing nothing but the image. I was told these image pages with zero content are very bad for SEO and that I should get them removed. I have contacted several Wordpress specialists on People Per Hour. I have basically been offered two solutions. 1 - redirect all these image pages to a 404, so they are not found by Google 2 - redirect each image page to the main post page the image is from. What's my best option here? Is there a better option? I don't care if these pages remain, providing they are not crawled by Google and classified as spam etc. All suggestions greatly received!

    | xpers
    0

  • Just came across an article that stated that Google is looking negatively at sites that attempt to hide text or use javascripts to expand text on websites. We are about to launch our new website and believe we are using this technique but im not certain if what we are doing will hurt us. Our website tends to be a little heavy on the text so used a "read more" scrpit that will expand when clicked on. Three sections that use this on the new website Take a look and let me know your thoughts http://joomplateshop.com/demos/catdi.com/

    | ChopperCharlie
    0

  • Certain search keywords are pulling up incorrect page titles and meta descriptions for our site. I've looked through our code, and the text used by Google in the search results is nowhere found inside our site. I've also looked at previous iterations of our site from over a decade ago and still haven't found it. I then searched specifically for the exact phrased incorrect meta descriptions and found a long list of spammy sites linking to our domain with the exact, incorrect meta description. Is this why Google is displaying the incorrect data, and how do I get Google to use the meta descriptions from my actual site?

    | Closetstogo
    0

  • I have a big cluttered website with endless pages. It's a non-profit that has content for patients, researchers, therapists, etc.. Would it be a bad idea to turn this cluttered site into 3 or more completely different sites, each focused on their specific demographic? Or should I just figure out how to organize the one site better? Thanks for your help!!!

    | bosleypalmer
    0

  • Preliminary Explanation: We launched a new website a couple months back but haven't had much luck in Google taking notice. One of the main attractions to our site is an old flash app that was made nearly a decade ago. As the original developer has long ago moved on and we are unable to figure out how to integrate it with our new site, we've been stuck hosting the flash app on a different domain. As such, users who come to our site and want to use the app must immediately navigate away from our site to this other domain. This has caused our primary domain's bounce rate and average site time to plummet while raising it for the other domain. My question: is this damaging our search rank and page authority with Google for this primary domain/site and counter-acting any other positive SEO changes we can make? How much weight does Google give towards bounce rate/average site time spent by users in its overall calculations for search rank and page authority? Our average site time for this primary domain is resting currently at 50-60 seconds, while for the secondary domain that hosts the old flash app it is 4-5 minutes.

    | Closetstogo
    0

  • Heya, so I am just in charge of the content on the site, and the SEO content, not the actual back-end stuff. A little under 2 weeks ago we switched to https, and our site traffic has been down a lot ever since. When I SERP check our keywords, they don't seem to have dropped in rankings pages. Here is what I got when I asked our dev guy if 301 redirects were put in: I did not add any redirects so all of the content is accessible on both unless individual links get hardcoded one way or the other. The only thing in place is a Cloudflare plugin which rewrites links in cached pages to match the way its accessed, so if for example you access a page over https you don’t get the version cached with a bunch of http links since that will throw up mixed content warnings in the browser. Other than that WP mostly generates all its links to match whatever protocol you are accessing the current page with. We can make specific pages redirect one way or the other in the future if we want to though... As a startup, site traffic is a metric we track to gouge progress, and so I really need to get to the bottom of if it was the change from http to https that has causes the drop, and if so, what can we do about it? Also, in case it is relevant: the bounce rate is now sky high (ave. 15% to 64% this last week!) Any help is very welcome! Site: https://mobileday.com Thank you!

    | MobileDay
    1

  • Hi We use bigcommerce and want to chage the way we display multiple images for our products. At the moment in bigcommerce you switch between images by clicking the next image, we want the images to change when we hover the curser over the image. Does anyone know how to do this ? Regards Adrienne

    | CostumeD
    0

  • A couple of campaign tracking links were created on my homepage (leading to internal pages), these were removed a few weeks ago (100% removed from the site). I understand there is a 6 month window and as long as a user returns (no matter from which source) they will be counted as a session against that campaign. Since these campaign links were set-up in error, I hoped creating a fresh new view within Google Analytics would stop them appearing. However they are still showing as sessions even in the new view (created after removing the campaign links in question). Is there anyway to stop this happening!? I want to be able to report on sessions correctly. Thanks, Sam

    | Sam.at.Moz
    0

  • Hi, a large client of mine has all of his franchisee network on sub domains and on separate wordpress websites (multi-sites). I have advised him that the best way forward is to use the main company .com domain and create sub folders for all of his franchisee areas. Does anyone foresee any problems with this going forward or do you have any advice to offer. I'd be interested in hearing what your verdict is on the subdomain vs subfolder war. Many thanks

    | johnos-journey
    0

  • Or is it not necessary to have a "home" tab/link because everybody by this time knows you can get to the home page by clicking on the logo?

    | FindLaw
    0

  • I own a Wordpress website which covers soccer in the DC MD VA area called DMV Soccer http://www.dmvsoccer.com/ We write weekly recaps where we tag a player who has scored a goal or performed well in a game. For each player, obviously, a tag is created. What I'm looking for is a plugin or solution that would allow me to tag a player, but also automatically assign a team to that player so that the team name and player's name are optimized on the individual player's tag page. So if I were to tag George Murphy on a recap, and I assign him to a team, let's say DC United. The tag page would have a title, something like: George Murphy Soccer Player for DC United and the meta description: George Murphy, soccer player from MD who players for DC United archives Or something similar, if that makes sense. Should I skip using tags and instead start assigning each player as a sub-category under each team? I'd like to try to avoid that, because not each category will be based on a player. Any suggestions in terms of existing plugins or other recommendations?

    | georgetsn
    1

  • We would like to make some navigation changes to our website: www.NetGainIT.com, specifically to the services section. I know that I will need a list of 301 redirects if I do not plan on keeping certain pages, but what else do I need to consider?

    | NetGainTech
    0

  • what seo benefit does setting up a photo gallery where each photo is a separate web page?  My old SEO guy set up my photo gallery like that claiming that because each photo was a separate page, it added a big seo benefit and i never understood what he was talking about.  Maybe alt text on the photo with key phrases in it pointing to my other pages to give my site a theme for google?  I'm not really sure.   He has since moved away and i am considering redoing the photo gallery to multiple images on one page to be more user friendly to my users.  This photo gallery is 3 years old and the photos might have some page rank to them helping my site so i don't want to remove this gallery if there really is a benefit to it and it will hurt my site.  I once removed four static page rank 3 pages from my site that weren't used for my site anymore and my rankings dropped 5 positions.  Thoughts anyone? Thanks! Ron

    | Ron10
    0

  • I am being asked to change these product links on the home page: Home/Condo
    Watercraft/Boat to Home
    Condo
    Watercraft
    Boat (Along with several other product links) How does this affect the customer experience/usability, and SEO? Is it a good idea or is it confusing? Thank you.

    | RoxBrock
    0

  • Hello, Where do you guys go to get inspiring new ideas for web design layouts. I'm making a portfolio and need one more design. I'm thinking 4 is enough sample sites. So far I have 3. Thanks!

    | BobGW
    1

  • Hello all, I have a client who currently has a very poor URL structure. As it stands, their URLs are formatted in the following manner: http://www.domain.com/category/subcategory/page In all my years of SEO, however, I have always tried to implement the following format: http://www.domain.com/category/page The web designer for this particular project has been very reluctant to change the structure for obvious reasons, but I'm convinced that by modifying the URL structure, SEO will improve. I am correct in thinking this? Likewise, if I am able to get the URL structure changed, what do I need to look out for to make sure we don't lose any traction for our keyword terms? Any and all insight/suggestions is greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading!

    | maxcarnage
    0

  • Hello all, I have a client who currently has a very poor URL structure. As it stands, their URLs are formatted in the following manner: http://www.domain.com/category/subcategory/page In all my years of SEO, however, I have always tried to implement the following format: http://www.domain.com/category/page The web designer for this particular project has been very reluctant to change the structure for obvious reasons, but I'm convinced that by modifying the URL structure, SEO will improve. I am correct in thinking this? Likewise, if I am able to get the URL structure changed, what do I need to look out for to make sure we don't lose any traction for our keyword terms? Any and all insight/suggestions is greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading!

    | maxcarnage
    0

  • Hi, we recently updated our website and our main navigation was dramatically slimmed down to just three pages and no drop down under those. Yet we have many more important pages, which are linked to once on one of those main three pages. However, will this hurt those other pages because they are not included in navigation (some of which were starting to get good traction in rankings)?
    Thanks!

    | LuaMarketing2
    0

  • I never quite understood why internal linking was such a big deal for SEO, but now I'm having second thoughts and perhaps understanding it more. I always thought since most websites have a navigation feature--usually the menu bar located at the top and often another one in the footer--that internal navigation was usually already built in to most websites and therefore, a silly topic to make a fuss over; however, I may be the silly one after all. I am now creating pages that are not included in the navigation so.... What is the best practice for this? If I am creating say, pages for certain locations and those location pages begin to number in the hundreds, it makes my navigation bar a little too cumbersome to have all those pages in a drop down menu. So I made a Locations page and just link to all those pages from that page (and from nowhere else). But now I'm wondering if this could be a bad internal linking practice and perhaps hurt my online visibility as an SEO ranking factor. Is this a crawl problem? And if so, is there a better option that provides a good visitor experience while appeasing the search engines.

    | Dino64
    0

  • We want to develop a beta site, in a directory with the robots.txt blocking bots.  We want to include the Google Tag Manager tags and event layer tracking code on this beta site. My question is that by including the Google Tag Manager code, that phones home to Google, will it cause Google to index this beta site when we don't want it indexed?

    | CFSSEO
    0

  • Hey guys, two weeks ago we switched over to the new website, however we've experienced about a 20% drop in Google Organic traffic and it does not appear we are getting indexed correctly by Google. On search results it's not using the meta description and the links still point to the old pages. Robots is fine We are using the same IP address Re-directs are in for the pages in question. Sitemap was submitted to Google in Webmaster tools What else do we need to do?

    | ScottOlson
    0

  • Hi,
    I'll keep this really short and sweet... I'm just intrigued more than anything. With the exception of user testing has anybody ever had a good experience with Fiverr? Obviously I'm not  contemplating SEO services for $5 but I'm just curious as to whether anybody has found any services that were genuinely useful in a day to day capacity?

    | ChrisHolgate
    2

  • Three different SEO guys suggest moving my blog to another platform. " I think migrating to a more robust CMS platform like Drupal or Wordpress would be a wise decision." But, they never say why moving would benefit SEO. My blog is on a custom domain, has lots of original content and has decent organic traffic to begin with. I think I have other SEO issues to deal with before bothering with a new platform. Does blogger stink for SEO? Why?

    | Eric_haney
    0

  • Setting aside my personal issue with Google's favoritism for Responsive websites, which I believe doesn't always provide the best user experience, I have a question regarding duplicate content... I created a section of a Wordpress web page (using Visual Composer) that shows differently on mobile than it does on desktop view. This section has the same content for both views, but is formatted differently to give a better user experience on mobile devices. I did this by creating two different text elements, formatted differently, but containing the same content. The problem is that both sections appear in the source code of the page. According to Google, does that mean I have duplicate content on this page?

    | Dino64
    0

  • We have a webshop with products provided with a content blok below the category/products page. Some products have an infinite scroll option because of the amount of product. Will infinite scroll affect ranking when there is an text below? Thanks!

    | Happy-SEO
    1

  • Our company website has needed a complete overhaul for some time now and the new one is almost ready to go live.  We also have a separate "news" site that is houses around 800 blog posts and news items.  (That news site will be thrown away because it's on a completely different domain and causes confusion.) So we have a main site with about 100 decent blog posts and a separate news site with 800 poor posts. I plan on bringing all the main site blog posts over to the new site (both WordPress), but my question is whether or not to bring over the news site posts?  All, handful, none? Another issue is the news site doesn't have Google Analytics, so I'm not sure if any posts actually generate traffic, but I can from the main site we do get some referrals from it. As far as quality of content goes, it's poor.  Not sure who wrote it all, but it's mainly text press releases that aren't very interesting. Is it worth bringing over for SEO purposes or simply delete the site and create a mass redirect so all of those pages will direct to the new website's blog page? Any help is greatly appreciated.

    | codyfrew
    0

  • Hi, we are using the apache module of google pagespeed. It works really great, helps a lot. But today I've asked me one question: Does the "lazy load" feature for images harm the ranking? The module reworks the page to load the images only if the are visible at the screen. Is this behavior also triggered by the google bot? Or are the images invisible for google? Any expirience about that? Best wishes, Georg.

    | GeorgFranz
    0

  • I'm trying to clean all of the Crawl Errors for my sites, and I've reached the point where I've become slightly confused. A lot of these pages that come up in Crawl Errors aren't being linked to anywhere. The ones I'm referring to are mostly pages that came with a theme that I'm using - part of the demo content - which I've since set to Unpublished Drafts. I'm not linking to these pages anywhere on any of my Published pages, yet Google is still looking for them, still showing them in Crawl Errors as Not Found. I'm assuming that Google found these pages at some point and can't find them now. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to keep setting up 301 redirects for these, or should I use the Disavow tool for these pages? I want to tell Google to forget these pages completely because I never intended for these pages to be indexed. This happens for just about all of my Wordpress websites in Google Search Console. Can someone please shed some light on this? If there are any articles on this problem, please share! Thanks!

    | Millermore
    0

  • Looking for community feedback: Some of our In house developers want to use Prismic.io over Wordpress for it's alleged ease of organizing and "deploying" content. It's essentially a repository for content from which you make API calls to. It's a rather new platform. There a few posts in Quora around SEO but looking to see if anyone has had experience with platform. My concern is around  page load times, excessive server requests, and content viewed as code. Any thoughts/ experiences would be much appreciated!

    | ArcherMalmo
    0

  • Hello everyone, The server (in-house) which we use to host our website is a bit old. We are using CDN77 for our static content. What if I move all our website to the CDN service? meaning I use their storage capability and just have our url point to the IP address they provide. Would that hurt our rankings?

    | Edgar-Cerecerez
    0

  • Our site is very regional, so we focus all of our seo efforts on each of these region landing pages. For Example: domain.com/toys/us/ca/san-francisco We added an informational page (ex. reviews) and gave it a url like this: domain.com/toys/us/ca/san-francisco/reviews Question: Will external backlinks to domain.com/toys/.../reviews provide any link juice value to it's hierarchical parent page: domain.com/toys/us/ca/san-francisco?

    | 42Floors
    0

  • After some extended debate with our web development team we are considering dropping the SSL from our website because it is adding almost 2 additional seconds to our download speeds.  We know there is a SEO boost from having a SSL but we believe the extended download speeds maybe outweighing the benefit. However we are concerned about the SEO implications of having no method possible of redirect SSL to non SSL webpages. Does anybody know of a Wordpress Plugin that can force redirect SSL urls to non SSL urls?

    | RosemaryB
    0

  • Morning Mozzers, Currently our website has 2 navigation bars. The top Navigation is the typical **Home - Products - Services - Contact - About **type thing The side navigation contains a link to top level categories, if a category is selected it shows the child categories
    Eg. Socks
    Shoes
    Boots Cateogry level (Socks) Blue Socks
    Red Socks
    Green Socks The top navigation has drop-down menus built in whilst the side nav does not. Would it be worthwhile to edit the nav bars so that the top nav bar contains the categories with the child categories displaying in dropdown list when clicked. Top Nav
    Home - Socks - Shoes - Boots when hovering over socks you would see Socks
    Blue Socks
    Red Socks
    Green Socks My reasons for the change I could remove the thin content "Products page" It would add a link to the categories and sub categories from every page on the website as it would be in the top navigation bar i think this would help with ranking for some of the sub-category pages that struggle. It would allow me to remove the left nav bar on the homepage, moving more content above the fold and give the website a more modern feel. What do you think? Is would this be a positive or negative change?

    | ATP
    0

  • Hello all, I'm hoping someone out there can give me a hand with this. I'm trying to modify my .htaccess file so that the site will go from maxcarnagemusic.com to www.maxcarnagemusic.com and also, so viewers will be redirected to www.maxcarnagemusic.com/home when they try to access the site. I've tried a few different things, including adding the 301 redirect plugin for Wordpress, but nothing seems to work. Can someone out there show/tell me how to create an htaccess file that will execute as much. I apologize in advance, my Apache experience is very, very limited. Thank you all in advance!

    | maxcarnage
    0

  • Our website is powered through Magento CMS although I am losing my patience with it. We are completely restricted as to what we can do. The development costs are high and ongoing. We are a fast moving company but we feel that Magento is not the right solution for the companies future. We can not style pages to drive conversions without putting styling requests to our developers which takes months to complete and the end results are not always as we would prefer, we would prefer to style the pages ourselves using blocks etc. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

    | Jseddon92
    0

  • Hi all, We are implementing an eCommerce site where the results pages of the products will be visibile on one page (always loading new products when you scroll down the page). Now, I have read that the Google spiders cannot "load" new products scrolling down the page, hence the spider only sees the first few products of the results page. Our developer wants to implement a system where a users sees the first products on example.com/products Then scrolling down, he will see new products with the URL changing to example.com/page/2 and so on. Is it enough that we add a pagination link that goes from example.com/products to example.com/page/2 Then another link that goes from example.com/page/2 to example.com/page/3 and so on, so the Google spider can make his way through all the pages? Or is that too much deep linking and the spider wouldn't even crawl all the results pages? Any recommendations how to go about this? Many thanks in advance!

    | Gabriele_Layoutweb
    0

  • Hi, are website servicemanualrepairs.com was removed from Bing and Yahoo index, I emailed Bing via Webmaster tools they first said it was Backlinks I did look via at the inbound links tool to analyze the site's Backlinks I did find 20 links and used the Disavow tool, they said  "I'm afraid but after careful and thorough investigation, your site still did not meet the Bing and Microsoft guidelines You may also refer to the  things to avoid section of the Webmaster Guidelines for additional information. As an effect, the site is still blocked and it cannot be lifted" the website was in Bing and  Yahoo  index for 3 Years  and only after the 20 Backlinks were added to the site it was de-index any help would be greatly appreciated Thanks

    | vista521
    1

  • I'm trying to optimise my ecommerce site's category/navigation structure so that it is: Intuitive for human users Keyword optimised, and Minimises duplicate content penalties Here is my dilemma. Let's say my site sells widgets. Some people search for widgets according to size (big widgets, medium widgets) while others search according to colour (green widgets, blue widgets). My keyword research suggests that I should target some keywords that relate to size, others that relate to colour, yet others relating to material, etc. I figured that I'd use one of these taxonomies as a category system, then set the others as filter elements. So my site's main navigation would say "Big Widgets | Medium Widgets | Small Widgets". If you click on any of them, or if you click on the "Widgets" supercategory, you'd reach a filter function allowing you to see only green widgets, or only plastic widgets, etc. So far so good - from a user perspective. The problem with this method is that Google isn't going to index my filter results. So someone Googling "green widgets" or "plastic widgets" is unlikely to find my site, even though I have plenty of green/plastic widgets that they could have filtered for. My next thought was to add some of these filter urls to my main navigation so they will be crawled. My filter mod generates urls for each filter (eg mysite.com/category?filter=k39;w24). So now I have a flashier navigation menu where clicking "Widgets" will pop out a panel allowing you to browse by size or by colour. I don't know whether users will find this helpful or redundant/confusing, but at least Google can see my filter urls. But I've run into two more problems. My filter results aren't really pages, so I can't set things like H1s, meta descriptions and so on. There's very little I can do to keyword optimise them. Further, I now have duplicate content, because the same widget can show up under multiple filter urls. And so I'm stuck here. I've thought about creating custom pages for each target keyword and manually listing products that pertain to each keyword. This will allow me to optimise the pages, but it's a lot of ongoing work (I have to update them whenever I get new stock), and I'm not sure my visitors will appreciate this - I suspect they would rather just browse/filter/search through my site than have to click through pages of manual curated content. I'd appreciate any thoughts or advice on figuring out my category and navigation system!

    | peekpeeka
    0

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