How to properly link to products from category pages?
-
Hi All,
We have an e-commerce website and the category pages are built so that there is a product image and below it there is the title. Both the image and the title are in a href (each on its own).
I encountered the following unfinished discussion here at MOZ:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-to-optimize-achor-text-links-on-ecommerce-category-page#post-93758The discussion states that its improper.
The question is - if it is wrong then why? (maybe because Google will give its weight to the image anchor instead of the text anchor since it is higher in the page).
The other question is how to resolve the matter?
Should I add nofollow to the image href?Thanks
-
Dear Everett,
Can you supply the link to the article?
Thanks
-
Also see this page for more information on using named anchor links (i.e. page.html#image) to avoid the "first link counts" issue. This is what Alan Mosley is recommending. I think it is much safer than using CSS to try and "trick" search engines. You can put the image on product pages in a named anchor like #image.
Resources:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/3-ways-to-avoid-the-first-link-counts-rule
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-first-link-counts-rule-and-the-hash-sign
-
No problem, glad I could help!
-
Works amazing!!!!!
Thanks a lot for all of your help.
-
I would do something like this: http://jsfiddle.net/D7vMG/3/ (do you see the z-indexes? it makes sure the anchor is higher positioned then the paragraph.)
You can of course use only the <a>-tag and not a heading. In that case you can put the position: absolute on the a-tag.</a>
<a>Hope it helps! Good luck!</a>
-
THANKS!!! I've been working on it since your first reply
Last question (I'm a bit rude now) -
I also have price beneath "The New Ipad" anchor. Currently it is not in the href and I'm thinking of keeping it this way (which would mean it will be in the H3 but not in the href).
Also, the href's are simple href's not surrounded by h3's, What do you think? Changing them? (keeping the price outside the href but inside the H3)
It seems correct but changing would mean of a lot of anchors will be changed on the entire website... scarry
-
Yeah of course, you can style the link any way you want. Even hide it
although I wouldn't recommend that hehe.
I made this jsfiddle for you: http://jsfiddle.net/D7vMG/1/
good luck trying it yourself!
-
It is pretty much as if the anchor flows over the entire image.
I did this a while back on a dutch telecom website called typhone dot nl. Check it out, it's on the frontpage (the offer blocks all have it)
The H3 is just there as an example. If I just got an H1 above all products, i use h2's, if there is a h2, i use h3's. and so on.
-
That's what the css code above does, it puts the link beneath the image visually when users look at the site, while keeping the link above the image in the actual code.
-
I should not of said 2 pages, but it has been shown that both links will give link text relevancy.
The javascript link will be followed, it will not help
-
Is there a way to do so and having the link appearing beneath the image?
I don't want to change the design
-
Dear Alan,
If Google will see it as two pages I'm guessing I will need to add a canonical to the # version. Is that the case?
What about having the image with a javascript link? (location.href) or is that suspicious?
-
Dont use no-follow, you will just leak link juice.
One way around this, is to use a anchor # in your url for the image. like page.html#someterm
This will in fact give you link text relevancy for both, google will see this as 2 different pages.
Make sure you have alt text for the image.
This tataic and well as what x-com may in the future be seen as over optimization, so it may be tter to do somthing like this
Your link text
You can just link the whole lot in the one link.
Or move your text to above the image.
-
Thank you for the answer.
I'm not too strong with css besides for the basics,
what you mean is that the anchor will be displayed beneath the image for the user even though the code is placed before the image and also that clicking on the image will actually be like clicking on the anchor since its size includes the image???
Brilliant, it will also give more "engagement credit" to the anchor instead of splitting it (actually ppl usually clicking on the image).
By the way, do you put all of your products on the page as H3?
Thanks
-
Hi Noamflint, we develop a lot of e-commerce websites and I want to fill you in how we tackled this problem several months ago and how.
We deleted the anchor of the image! In our code it looks something like:
The New iPad
As you see at the moment there is no anchor on the image, but our clients do want this. because of usabilty. and people just love clicking images.
We solved this with CSS:
div { position: relative; padding-top: 30px; display: block; }
div h3 { position: absolute; top: 0px; left: 0px; display: block; }
div h3 a { width: 200px; height: 230px; display: block; }
div img { width: 200px; height: 200px; display: block; }
This code above is pseudo of course, but i hope you see what we are trying to accomplish. The anchor tag is positioned absolute in the parent div. With the dimensions on it, the link is above the image, so when people hover the image. they automatically hover the link. Clicking in it, takes them to the detail page.
You should try it! Maybe it will help you out.
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
-
Url structure on product pages - Should we apply canonicalized links in breadcrumbs or entry folders
We have products in the that go into mulitiple categories on our e-commerce site. But of course, each product is only canonicalized to one category. My question is: what should the breadcrumbs look like when users access a product from a non-canonicalized/primary category ?Should we apply canonicalized links in breadcrumbs or entry folders? For example: Let´s say we have product called "glacier hiking in the alps". It is in two categories; 1) glacier hiking 2) mountain tours. And is canonicalized to the glacier hiking category. If a user accesses it from the mountain tours category, should the url/breadcrumbs look like this: www.example.com/glacier-hiking/glacier-hiking-in-the-alps (because that is the canonicalized version) Or should it look like like this: www.example.com/mountain-tours/glacier-hiking-in-the-alps (because that is where the user came from) Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | guidetoiceland0 -
Should I remove all vendor links (link farm concerns)?
I have a web site that has been around for a long time. The industry we serve includes many, many small vendors and - back in the day - we decided to allow those vendors to submit their details, including a link to their own web site, for inclusion on our pages. These vendor listings were presented in location (state) pages as well as more granular pages within our industry (we called them "topics). I don't think it's important any more but 100% of the vendors listed were submitted by the vendors themselves, rather than us "hunting down" links for inclusion or automating this in any way. Some of the vendors (I'd guess maybe 10-15%) link back to us but many of these sites are mom-and-pop sites and would have extremely low authority. Today the list of vendors is in the thousands (US only). But the database is old and not maintained in any meaningful way. We have many broken links and I believe, rightly or wrongly, we are considered a link farm by the search engines. The pages on which these vendors are listed use dynamic URLs of the form: \vendors<state>-<topic>. The combination of states and topics means we have hundreds of these pages and they thus form a significant percentage of our pages. And they are garbage 🙂 So, not good.</topic></state> We understand that this model is broken. Our plan is to simply remove these pages (with the list of vendors) from our site. That's a simple fix but I want to be sure we're not doing anything wring here, from an SEO perspective. Is this as simple as that - just removing these page? How much effort should I put into redirecting (301) these removed URLs? For example, I could spend effort making sure that \vendors\California- <topic>(and for all states) goes to a general "topic" page (which still has relevance, but won't have any vendors listed)</topic> I know there is no distinct answer to this, but what expectation should I have about the impact of removing these pages? Would the removal of a large percentage of garbage pages (leaving much better content) be expected to be a major factor in SEO? Anyway, before I go down this path I thought I'd check here in case I miss something. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkWill0 -
Links from new sites with no link juice
Hi Guys, Do backlinks from a bunch of new sites pass any value to our site? I've heard a lot from some "SEO experts" say that it is an effective link building strategy to build a bunch of new sites and link them to our main site. I highly doubt that... To me, a new site is a new site, which means it won't have any backlinks in the beginning (most likely), so a backlink from this site won't pass too much link juice. Right? In my humble opinion this is not a good strategy any more...if you build new sites for the sake of getting links. This is just wrong. But, if you do have some unique content and you want to share with others on that particular topic, then you can definitely create a blog and write content and start getting links. And over time, the domain authority will increase, then a backlink from this site will become more valuable? I am not a SEO expert myself, so I am eager to hear your thoughts. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | witmartmarketing0 -
How many inner links on one page?
I have seen Matt Cutts video about links per page and know that too many links "may" harm the flow of link juice. But what should e-commerce sites do? We have category pages with more than a few thousands products in each of them. So linking to each of them dilutes the PR flow? We could use pagination, but doesn't it give a disadvantage in user experience when he needs to go 10 links deep to reach a product? And Google robots won't update the information frequently because it will be on the lowest part of our site? Now our goal is to make all our products appear like Facebook scroll down page. We know that Google doesn't use Ajax to see more links so robots and all the users that don't have JavaScript could see the paginated results. Is it a good way to put all products and links like this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | komeksimas1 -
On Page vs Off Page - Which Has a Greater Effect on Rankings?
Hi Mozzers, My site will be migrating to a new domain soon, and I am not sure how to spend my time. Should I be optimizing our content for keywords, improving internal linking, and writing new content - or should I be doing link building for our current domain (or the new one)? Is there a certain ratio that determines rankings which can help me prioritize these to-dos?, such as 70:30 in favor of link-building? Thanks for any help you can offer!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Linking to local pages on main page - keyword self-cannibalization issue?
Hi guys, Our website has this landing page: www.example.com/service1/ Is this considered keyword self-cannibalization if on the above page we link to local pages such as: www.example.com/service1-in-chicago/ www.example.com/service1-in-newyork/ www.example.com/service1-in-texas/ Many thanks David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sssrpm0 -
Where does "Pages Similar" link text come from?
When I type in a competitor name (in this case "buycostumes") Google shows several related websites in it's "Pages Similar to..." section at the bottom of the page:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | costumeMy question, can anyone tell me where the text comes from that Google uses as the link. Our competitors have nice branded links and our is just a keyword. I can find nothing on-page that Google is using so it must be coming from someplace off-page, but where?
0 -
Category pages in forums
I would like to hear feedback on the best SEO practice for forum category pages. An example would be a forum about cars. You can have a Chervorlet category which contains forums for every chevy model. Often this category page is simply a list of all the forums. If I noindex, follow the page then am I missing an opportunity? I am thinking of Google sitemaps for example where this page can be used for a category link. If I noindex the page, there probably isn't another great place for a sitemap to link to. I could fill out the page with wiki-like generic chevy information. Please share any thoughts or best practices.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanKent0