Indexing an e-commerce site
-
Hi all,
My client babyblingstreet.com. She sells baby and toddler clothing. Now a lot of the links on her site contain the same products. For instance: if you go to "What's new" you can find those same products in let's say her "Sale Items" link category.
The real problem with this is let's say my client sells a green dress and someone accesses it through the "baby and toddler dresses" category. And let's say this URL has 10 links pointing to it. Now, let's say someone else accesses this same green dress through the "What's new" category. And let's say this particular URL has 10 links pointing to it. Instead of having 20 links pointing to one URL about the green dress, I now have 10 links pointing to one URL and 10 pointing to another URL even though both URLs feature the exact same green dress.
In this particular example I would want to make the URL of the green dress in the "baby and toddler clothing" section be the canonical URL. So that means I would have to use this canonical tag on the green dress URL that's in the "what's new" category and let's say also the "sale items" category. This could get very tedious if my client has 200+ products. So I am wondering if I have to place a canonical tag on every URL that displays the green dress?
More importantly, I would like to know other people's strategies for indexing e-commerce sites that have the same product featured in multiple categories throughout the site.
I hope this makes sense. Thanks for your time.
-
I think you're right. Again, thanks for the well-informed response. I will take a lot of what you have just said into consideration. I also side with you about the duplicate issues. I may be a bit cynical here, but I have always found it hard to believe that Google will ever give us the complete truth.
-
This is one area where I am 99.99999% confident saying that Google's past statements are incorrect and even irresponsible. Panda is, in many ways, an assault on thin content, and duplicates are worse than thin. I've seen many large-scale sites take massive hits from duplicates (as much as 80% traffic loss).
The "myth" is that duplicate content causes a Capital-P Penalty, but Google uses a very narrow and self-serving definition of that term. Duplicate content does not cause a manual penalty and they probably don't consider Panda to be a penalty internally at Google. However, the consequences are very severe.
Even before Panda, I saw cases studies where reducing duplicate content greatly improved rankings. I had a client whose "product" pages (it was an event site) were being filtered out due to massive duplication. Once we fixed the problem, their search traffic tripled over the course of 3 months. This was well before May Day and Panda (2007, if memory serves). Today, it's 10X worse.
When you get into e-commerce, the problem is almost inevitable and needs to be managed. Now, does that mean that you're currently facing ranking issues, Panda, etc.? No, not necessarily. You have less than 2K indexed pages, which is hardly excessive. If each product page has one duplicate, and you know that can't spin out of control, the consequences are limited. Still, you're diluting your ranking ability to some extent. I think it's well worth addressing the problem and being proactive.
-
Thank you for your well-informed response, Peter. You are right, though it is tedious, I still have to do it.
In regards to product duplicates severely harming my client's ability to rank, I am not quite sure if that's true. Google has wrote extensive material about duplicate content and how it's a myth that it affects ranking. I am not quite sure how truthful that is, but here's a link to one of those articles:
http://www.spottedpanda.com/2011/seo-news/confirmed-seo-facts-matt-cutts/
As for not seeing the duplicate product URLs in action, that's simply because the site is ground-floor. I inherited this project about a month and a half-ago from a design company who only built her a beautiful site. They did not optimize one thing for her. What's worse is that they used this heavily, technically involved cart software called ProductCart. The cart uses .Asp technology, which I am not sure if you aware of this, but many servers aren't built anymore to handle this legacy coding format.
The real problem I am facing, per @activitysuper response, is that the link in the cat is the same the as the link in products section. What I am saying is that there's a completely different cat that also has that same product but with a different URL.
You are both right, this is probably something I can remedy on the server-side. I was just merely throwing this out there to determine how other SEOs deal with having the same product in multiple categories.
Thanks for your time.
-
How do you claim to be part of a community when all you offer is criticisms and for that matter complete ignorance? Do me a favor and never waste my time with such an ignorant response again. You know nothing about me, my client or the background of the situation.
-
It may be tedious, but you need to do it, one way or another. Theoretically, these product duplicates could be severely harming your client's ranking ability.
Practically, I'm not seeing much evidence, though, of these duplicate paths or duplicate products in the Google index. I am seeing other duplicate pages, like search results and https: versions of your product pages. You have a few canonicalization issues going on.
Ideally, no matter what category path, you'll land on one URL. The very small usability consequences of the path change (in my experience, at least) are far outweighed by the risks of spinning off dozens of duplicates. As @activitysuper said, there should be a way to do this dynamically - you're changing a couple of templates, not individual product pages.
I would have to see the duplicate product URLs in action, though. I'm not finding that specific problem.
-
You must be able to dynamically code the canonical tags into those 'new products'.
The really question is why have you got 2 pages? Surely you have a link in the cat and a link in the new products section linking to the same page.
-
how do you manage to pick up clients without having an understanding of how to optimise their site? seems a bit odd
-
If you are using Magento Commerce, just select the option in Config.
If you are using something else, then you may need a plugin.
Any eCommerce software should have already run into this problem a couple years ago.
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
-
Trying to get Google to stop indexing an old site!
Howdy, I have a small dilemma. We built a new site for a client, but the old site is still ranking/indexed and we can't seem to get rid of it. We setup a 301 from the old site to the new one, as we have done many times before, but even though the old site is no longer live and the hosting package has been cancelled, the old site is still indexed. (The new site is at a completely different host.) We never had access to the old site, so we weren't able to request URL removal through GSC. Any guidance on how to get rid of the old site would be very appreciated. BTW, it's been about 60 days since we took these steps. Thanks, Kirk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kbates0 -
Site map creator
I have a large website with about 1300 pages. I can't find a good sitemap creator that will crawl the whole site and spit out the xml file. Any ideas or suggestions for good services? Also, a site this large, should I consider mutiple site maps?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dwebb0070 -
Why my site not ranking
Hello everyone, can anyone suggest me, where i am having problem in my site www.suntechengineers.com, i know content is less,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | poojathakar
but any other things that i am missing in my site? Is There any on page query please let me know, i need urgently getting up this,please help thanx in advance0 -
Possible problem with new site (GWT no queries/very low index vs. submitted)
Hi everyone, I recently launched a new website for a small business loan company in the Dallas area. The site has been live for roughly a month and a half. I submitted everything to GWT as usual, including my sitemap. I am not sure what's going on with the site, as there is no activity from GWT in the impressions or queries. The submit vs. index is 24/3 (and hasn't moved). Also the queries graph on the overview stops at 3/18/2015... On another note, when I go to Crawl > Sitemaps, it shows that there were pages indexed during the month of march and then on April 3 it drops from 17 to 2 and never increases. Google says there are no errors or issues found, but I feel like there's something wrong. When I do site:, my URLs do pop up which makes me believe there's just a problem with my GWT. With that being said, I'm not happy THINKING there's something wrong. I need to actually know what the problem is. The only thing I can think of that I have done is purchase SSL for the site, but when I search what pages are indexed using www. it shows all the HTTPS URLS, so that would tell me that the site is getting indexed without a problem? Does anyone have a clue as to what might be happening? I will attach some screen shots so that you can get a better idea... KQ2366i D5xBNZf mF7kkgW
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jameswesleyhunt0 -
Reindexing a site with www.
We have a site that has a mirror - i.e. www.domain.com and domain.com - there is not redirect both url's work and show pages so basically a site with 2 sets of URLs for each page. We have changed it so the domain.com and all assorted pages 301 redirect to the right URL with www. i.e. domain.com/about 301's to www.domain.com/about In the search engines the domain.com is the site indexed and the only www. page indexed is the homepage. I checked in the robots.txt file and nothing blocking the search engines from indexing both the www. and non www. versions of the site which makes me wonder why did only one version get indexed and how did the clients avoid a duplicate content issue? Secondly is it best to get the search engines to unidex domain.com and resubmit www.domain.com for the full site? We are definately staying with the www.domain.com NOT domain.com so need to find the best way to get the site indexed with www. and remove the non www. Hope that makes sense and look forward to everyone's input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Site Navigation
Hi Mozzers, I am an SEO at uncommongoods.com and looking for your opinion on our site nav. Currently our nav & URLs are structured in 3 levels. From the top level down, they are: 1. Category ex: http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden 2. Subcat ex: http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden/bed-bath 3. Family ex:http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden/bed-bath/bath-accessories Right now, all levels are accessible from our top nav but we are considering removing the family pages. If we did that, Google could still find & crawl links to the family pages, but they would have to drill down to the subcat pages to find them. Do you guys think this would help or hurt our SEO efforts? Thanks! -Zack
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | znotes0 -
Site #2 beats site #1 in every aspect?
Hey guys, loving SEOMoz so far and will definitely continue my subscription after the free trial. I have a question however, which I am really confused about. When researching my primary keyword, I have found that the second ranked site beats the top site in every single aspect, apart from domain age, which is almost 6 years for the top one and 6 months for the second. When I say every single aspect, I mean everything. More authority for the page and domain, more links, more anchor text links, more authoritive links, more social signals, more relevant links, better domain (although second ranked site is a .net), better MozRank, better MozTrust etc.... I have noticed though, that in the UK SERPs, those sites are switched, so #2 is actually #1. Could it be that the US SERPs just haven't updated yet, or am I missing something completely different.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | darrenspeed1 -
How to best utilize network of 50 sites to increase traffic on main site
Hey All, First off I wanna thank everyone who has responded to all my previous questions! Love to see a community that is so willing to help those who are learning the ropes! Anyways back to my point. We have a main site that is a PR 3 and our main focal point for lead generation. We recently acquired 50 additional sites (all with a PR of 1-3) that we would like to use as our own little back linking campaign with. All the domains are completely relevant to our main site as well as specific pages within our main site. I know that reciprocal links will get me no where and that google is quickly on to the attempted 3 way link exchange. My question is how do I best link these 50 sites to not only maintain there own integrity and PR but also assist our main site. Thanks All!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deuce1s0