Link Product Thumb & Product Name with same anchor link?
-
We have an issue on one of our sites we're monitoring a campaign for that seems to have TOO many links on each page. I think the biggest reason is that each product listing on each category page has two separate anchor links into that page. One for the thumb and one for the name. So even though there should only be 60-70 links on each category page, that amount is being inflated because each product listing technically is being split into two separate links.
Question is, should I place the thumbnail and name within the same anchor link? We do this on a lot of other sites we operate, but I'm not sure what's a better strategy. It would seem to me that it would be better to have a single anchor link that shares the thumb and product name.
-
It is unusual to endorse one of the shortest answers on the page, but Axel is to-the-point and, IMO, correct in this case. You don't want to paginate too heavily because that creates more clicks to get to all of your products. In fact, Google even recommends using a View All canonical page if it doesn't affect performance (load time) too much.
The first link anchor is what counts so I respectfully disagree with dittoeffect, unless you were to link to the image on the product page from the image on the category page using a Named Anchor hashtag (could be a good thing to test).
You don't want a bunch of iframes on your category page either. Keep it simple. You run an honest eCommerce site, not an uber-competitive affiliate website where you have to put links into a redirect script that goes through a directory that's blocked in the robots.txt file, etc...
Make the alt text and link text the same unless you are testing the named anchor link idea mentioned above.
And as Alan Gray said, test. These are all just opinions based on experience until you test.
-
Whatever you do, you should test and measure.
Only then will you know if it makes a difference.
There don't seem to be any definitive answers.
After you do that, you could tell others the results of your experiments.
-
too much overhead in a productive space.
I would go Text & picutre in one link
-
Ted, why don't you add pagination to your product pages?
You might list 10 items on a page and link the thumbnail image and product title to the item details page without any issues.
-
This is a really good question. Actually what I think is best is actually keeping the links separate and using the appropriate and most descriptive text for the page the text link points to and using the next best phrase in the image for the alt text. ex if you have a product called "big red dog house" then that would be the text link anchor text and the image alt text would be "large red dog house".
To solve the issue of too many links you should create subcategories within the categories to display fewer listings per page to reduce the number of links.
Now if you are worried about burring products make sure to divide the categories as evenly as you can so they do not go too deep. So if you have 70 products that were on the "dog houses" page try to make the dog houses page lead to a page with two links to categories "small dog houses" with about half the products and "large dog houses" with the other half. this way you create a tree of sorts (you can make many categories). The idea is to layer your navigation to guide the user towards what they want to find while structuring your navigation to give your products the attention they deserve from and seo stand point.
hope this helps
-
Putting the product name & image in the same anchor is the best bet. You can put the image anchor in javascript without taking the image out of the search index.
-
Yeah, but I want the image to be linked. I don't want to do away with the image links in the search engines eyes. I just want to link to both the most seo friendly way possible. That's why I figured placing the thumbnail and the product name within the same anchor link could possibly be the best bet. Our images actually rank fairly well in google images so doing what you suggest would be suicide in that respect, either for the image, or for the anchor text which is likely way more important.
-
You could make one of the links a javascript link or embed in an iframe and exclude the iframe files from robots.
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
-
Duplicate content from page links
So for the last month or so I have been going through fixing SEO content issues on our site. One of the biggest issues has been duplicate content with WHMCS. Some have been easy and other have been a nightmare trying to fix. Some of the duplicate content has been the login page when a page requires a login. For example knowledge base article that are only viewable by clients etc. Easily fixed for me as I dont really need them locked down like that. However pages like affiliate.php and pwreset.php that are only linked off of a page. I am unsure how to take care of these types. Here are some pages that are being listed as duplicate: Should this type of stuff be a 301 redirect to cart.php or would that break something. I am guessing that everything should point back to cart.php.
On-Page Optimization | | blueray
https://www.bluerayconcepts.com/brcl...art.php?a=view
https://www.bluerayconcepts.com/brcl...php?a=checkout These are the ones that are really weird to me. These are showing as duplicate content but pwreset is only a link of the KB category. It shows up as duplicate many times as does affilliate.php: https://www.bluerayconcepts.com/brcl...ebase/16/Email
https://www.bluerayconcepts.com/brcl...16/pwreset.php Any help is overly welcome.0 -
How can I write unique and seductive product descriptions about multiple, very similar products?
We are an eCommerce store who sell personalised phone cases, macbook covers, mugs and the like. Our target market is primarily 16-25 and female. We're in the process of redesigning our website www.mrnutcase.com and we desperately need some more enticing product descriptions before the redesign goes live. The problem is that most of our products are exactly the same. For example iPhone 5 case, iPhone 5S Case etc. At the moment our product descriptions are almost the same, but written in a slightly different way. Not only is this dangerous in terms of duplicate content, but it's also extremely boring for the user. With our users being young and female, writing about boring technical specifications isn't going to cut it with the crowd. Obviously, i want each of our pages to rank in Google so I don't want to NoIndex or canonicalize any pages or anything. How can I write unique and enticing product descriptions for very similar products? Would appreciate any ideas! Thanks, Danny
On-Page Optimization | | DannyNutcase0 -
Too Many on page links on my homepage question?
Question, on moz analytics, for my homepage, I've gotten the " Too many on page links" notification every crawl. I've always ignored it because i didnt think it affected ranking or anything really. The on page links on the bottom of our homepage are landing pages. Most users reach those pages by searching those specific pages on google. We just decided to put them on the bottom of our page for unknown reasons. My question is, should i remove the landing pages on the bottom of our homepage? WIll it improve search rankings for my homepage? if i do remove them, should i put the landing pages on another page besides the homepage? Does google index my website better without the on page links on my homepage? My website is- prestigeluxuryrentals.com
On-Page Optimization | | prestigeluxuryrentals.com0 -
Business Name is Meta Description
I would like to know what your opinion would be regarding the business name displayed in the meta description. Would you write your business name as: Business Name or BusinessName™ (no space with Trademark) I used MOZ example from here (Meta Descriptions Best Practice) and inserted the different business names. Welcome to Business Name in San Diego, California - the nation's largest urban cultural park. Home of 15 major museums, renowned performing arts venues... Welcome to businessname™ in San Diego, California - the nation's largest urban cultural park. Home of 15 major museums, renowned performing arts venues... I'm not sure which would be best for Google and other search engines. Thanks for your help.
On-Page Optimization | | Kdruckenbrod0 -
Should links on a family bar be no follows?
I have a network of sites that we use a family bar for to get the user to where they want to go but as I am looking at my link profile, i keep on seeing these links everywhere. (DUH, of course) Question is, should these links be no follow? Could these links hurt me?
On-Page Optimization | | SBRMarketing0 -
Outgoing Links Best Practice
Hi, It is my understanding that it is good practice to add relevant out going links to my content pages. I do not intend to over do it and the out going links I intend to add would be useful for the reader. My question is do I need to add noindex/nofollow tags to these links? Does it make any difference either way or can I just leave them as index/follow links? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | UnderMe0 -
Homepage vs. Product page competition
I think my homepage and basic product listing page may be competing.. We have a very old domain with lots of links w/ generic anchor text ( click here, etc. ) That page is http://mybrand.com which Google ranks for our "widgets" search term. We have a page http://ourbrand.com/widgets that lists the 5 or 6 basic widgets we sell. This page is indexed also, but doesn't have nearly as many links since it is new compared to the age of the domain. After reading this.. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization I I'm not really sure I can remove all "widgets" links from our homepage, since that's a core part of our site's menu / hierarchy. So maybe my best effort would be to reorganize the page so that the homepage focuses on Our Brand Name Widgets .. and let the product page focus on the widgets keyword. Is having those two pages serve to represent those two separate but similar keywords feasible? Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | minutiae0 -
Ecommerce Product Subcategory URL
Our website has 5 main categories displayed in tabs in the header. The main landing page of each of the 5 categories is a paginated page (3pages- set up with canonical tags to avoid duplicate content) with a side bar which splits the main category into many subcategories. Each of these subcategories essentially filter the main landing page into more defined categories customers find useful (price/colour) BUT once clicked enter into a separate landing page. We have worked hard to avoid any duplicate content issues between these sub-landing pages and the main landing page. This was done as we wanted each of the subpages to organically rank (thus we went with this method rather than filters). Hope we didn't do the wrong thing there? The question is should these sub-landing pages route straight from home to have the best chance to get individually ranked or routed through the main category bearing in mind we have 5 main categories each with many subcategories. i.e. domain.co.uk/subcategory or domain.co.uk/category/subcategory Thanks in advance for any advice given.
On-Page Optimization | | jannkuzel0