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
-
Breaking up a site into multiple sites
Hi, I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content. I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last. I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timdavis0 -
Merging Two Unrelated Sites into a Third Site
We have a new client interested in possibly merging 2 sites into one under the brand of a new parent company. Here's a breakdown of the scenario..... BrandA.com sells a variety of B2B widget-services via their online store. BrandB.com sells a variety of B2B thing-a-majig products and services (some of them large in size) not sold through an online store. These are sold more consultatively via a sales team. The new parent company, BrandA-B.com is considering combining the two sites under the new brand parent company domain. The Widget-services and Thing-A-Majigs have very little similarity or purchase crossover; so just because you're interested in one doesn't make you a good candidate for the other. We feel pretty confident that we can round-up all the necessary pages and inbound links to do proper transitioning to a new, separate third domain though we're not in agreement that this is the best course of action. Currently the individual brand sites are fairly well known in their industry and each ranks fairly well for a variety of important terms though there is room for improvement and each site has good links with the exception of the new site which has considerably fewer. BrandA.com DA = 73 - 19 years old
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OPM
BrandB.com DA = 55 - 18 years old
BrandA-B.com DA = 40 - 1 year old Our SEO team members have opinions on what the potential outcome(s) of this would be but are wondering what the community here thinks. Will the combining of the sites cause a dilution of the topics of the two sites and hurt rankings? Will the combining of the domain authority help one set part of the business but hurt the other? What do you think? What would you do?0 -
Proper 301 in Place but Old Site Still Indexed In Google
So i have stumbled across an interesting issue with a new SEO client. They just recently launched a new website and implemented a proper 301 redirect strategy at the page level for the new website domain. What is interesting is that the new website is now indexed in Google BUT the old website domain is also still indexed in Google? I even checked the Google Cached date and it shows the new website with a cache date of today. The redirect strategy has been in place for about 30 days. Any thoughts or suggestions on how to get the old domain un-indexed in Google and get all authority passed to the new website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler0 -
E-commerce category page optimization - filters vs. categories
Hi, We currently have a site where there are several subcategories for every main category. So this means that visitors will have to click through 3-4 subcategories before reaching products that they could have easily found if the site would be using filters on category pages. My question is - if a subcategory page with 4 products is currently a category page (optimized heading, description) and I'd want this category to be available through filters, how do I still keep it optimized for search engines? So under a category "Cleaners", we have all cleaning products. There are 8 "Cable cleaners" under this category. This is currently a subcategory, but I'd just solve this with a filter in the "Cleaners" screen. Not sure what's right from an SEO standpoint here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JaanMSonberg0 -
Development site is live (and has indexed) alongside live site - what's the best course of action?
Hello Mozzers, I am undertaking a site audit and have just noticed that the developer has left the development site up and it has indexed. They 301d from pages on old site to equivalent pages on new site but seem to have allowed the development site to index, and they haven't switched off the development site. So would the best option be to redirect the development site pages to the homepage of the new site (there is no PR on dev site and there are no links incoming to dev site, so nothing much to lose...)? Or should I request equivalent to equivalent page redirection? Alternatively I can simply ask for the dev site to be switched off and the URLs removed via WMT, I guess... Thanks in advance for your help! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart1 -
Migrating a very large site
hello, we are thinking about changing imageworksstudio.com to imageworkscreative.com we have TONS of of pages and want to make sure that our Page Rank and Rankings are maintained. Are there any best practices or specific guides for redirecting for such a large site (which already has a bunch of redirects in place in the first place) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imageworks-2612900 -
One site or five sites for geo targeted industry
OK I'm looking to try and generate traffic for people looking for accommodation. I'm a big believer in the quality of the domain being used for SEO both in terms of the direct benefit of it having KW in it but also the effect on CTR a good domain can have. So I'm considering these options: Build a single site using the best, broad KW-rich domain I can get within my budget. This might be something like CheapestHotelsOnline.com Advantages: Just one site to manage/design One site to SEO/market Better potential to resell the site for a few million bucks Build 5 sites, each catering to a different region using 5 matching domains within my budget. These might be domains like CheapHotelsEurope.com, CheapHotelsAsia.com etc Advantages: Can use domains that are many times 'better' by adding a geo-qualifier. This should help with CTR and search Can be more targeted with SEO & Marketing So hopefully you see the point. Is it worth the dilution of SEO & marketing activities to get the better domain names? I'm chasing the longtail searchs whetever I do. So I'll be creating 5K+ pages each targeting a specific area. These would be pages like CheapestHotelsOnline.com/Europe/France/Paris or CheapHoteslEurope.com/France/Paris to target search terms targeting hotels in Paris So with that thought, is SEO even 100% diluted? Say, a link to the homepage of the first option would end up passing 1/5000th of value through to the Paris page. However a link to the second option would pass 1/1000th of the link juice through to the Paris page. So by thet logic, one only needs to do 1/5th of the work for each of the 5 sites ... that implies total SEO work would be the same? Thanks as always for any help! David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OzDave0 -
Push for site-wide https, but all pages in index are http. Should I fight the tide?
Hi there, First Q&A question 🙂 So I understand the problems caused by having a few secure pages on a site. A few links to the https version a page and you have duplicate content issues. While there are several posts here at SEOmoz that talk about the different ways of dealing with this issue with respect to secure pages, the majority of this content assumes that the goal of the SEO is to make sure no duplicate https pages end up in the index. The posts also suggest that https should only used on log in pages, contact forms, shopping carts, etc." That's the root of my problem. I'm facing the prospect of switching to https across an entire site. In the light of other https related content I've read, this might seem unecessary or overkill, but there's a vaild reason behind it. I work for a certificate authority. A company that issues SSL certificates, the cryptographic files that make the https protocol work. So there's an obvious need our site to "appear" protected, even if no sensitive data is being moved through the pages. The stronger push, however, stems from our membership of the Online Trust Alliance. https://otalliance.org/ Essentially, in the parts of the internet that deal with SSL and security, there's a push for all sites to utilize HSTS Headers and force sitewide https. Paypal and Bank of America are leading the way in this intiative, and other large retailers/banks/etc. will no doubt follow suit. Regardless of what you feel about all that, the reality is that we're looking at future that involves more privacy protection, more SSL, and more https. The bottom line for me is; I have a site of ~800 pages that I will need to switch to https. I'm finding it difficult to map the tips and tricks for keeping the odd pesky https page out of the index, to what amounts to a sitewide migratiion. So, here are a few general questions. What are the major considerations for such a switch? Are there any less obvious pitfalls lurking? Should I even consider trying to maintain an index of http pages, or should I start work on replacing (or have googlebot replace) the old pages with https versions? Is that something that can be done with canonicalization? or would something at the server level be necessary? How is that going to affect my page authority in general? What obvious questions am I not asking? Sorry to be so longwinded, but this is a tricky one for me, and I want to be sure I'm giving as much pertinent information as possible. Any input will be very much appreciated. Thanks, Dennis
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dennis.globalsign0