Faceted navigation, Affiliate links, Meta descriptions - Oh My!
-
Hi, I have recently come across an issue with the faceted navigation / dynamic URLs for one of my client sites:
From a top level category you can filter by product material, size, type and colour. The URLs which are generated go a little something like this: www.domainname.co.uk/category.aspx?finish=leather&colour=--+no+filter+--
When selected, a 'facet' 302 redirects from the main category URL (no canonical tags in place yet - working on it).
The 'facets' are indexed (although when clicked on from SERPs actually go to a slightly different URL than by navigating there from the site) but they don't display the Meta description in SERPs (instead displaying a list of items from a drop down menu held within a table - probably as it's the first bit of copy the search engines see on the page).
How can I get the Meta description to display in SERPs?
Also, I tried to add a link to a 'facet' from my blog (just for testing purposes) and I got redirected to the page via their affiliate program.
Ideally I want to 'link build' to these pages both internally and via the clients blog but it seems as though there'll be no value in it.
Has anyone come across this before and if so, what can I do about it?
FYI they are using IIS 6 with asp.net
Thanks in advance!
-
Donford's answer is good then - they're probably ignoring those meta description tags as not relevant to the search query. So it's not that they won't display them (assuming they're correctly set up) it's more that they're ignoring them as they're not relevant.
From the horse's mouth: "Google will sometimes use the meta description of a page in search results snippets, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content."
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35624
-
Yes there is a meta description - it's the same one as for the main category though, before any filters are aplied. Obv I will look at providing unique descriptions for all of the facets but until I can work out how to get SEs to display them...
-
Is there a meta description tag actually being generated?
-
HI Laura,
I can only comment on one question asked... " How can I get the Meta description to display in Serps?"
Google will use whatever they feel most appropriate for their users. The meta description does hold value, but when Google is returning results to its searchers they will try to return relevant snippets based on what the user searched for.
Example:
Your webpage is about Pajamas and the user searches for Banana Pajamas Google may ignore your Meta description "Family Friendly Pajamas available in cotton and silk for age 2 to adult"And return "banana pajamas....print sizes kids small..available in standard banana print, adult themes and more.."
Remember search engines first priority is the users, not the websites.
Hope that helps with that question. I leave the other stuff for somebody more experienced in ASP.. I'm a php person myself.
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
-
New meta description limit?
Hi guys is the new meta description limit something temporary - Google just testing or can we assume it will remain moving forward? Just wondering if i should increase my meta description limit to 300 characters for all my sites. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cathywix0 -
What to do about new meta description character limit?
Hey Everyone, So as I'm sure everyone has heard the new meta description limits have been increased and I have been going back and forth with whether or not to update my descriptions for my client's websites. I know that Google is now dynamically generating descriptions based off of content, but is it still beneficial to write longer descriptions as well? Will Google display my longer description now if it is ranking well? Rand Fishkin at Moz and others say that you should and other people, including Danny Sullivan, have said you shouldn't worry about it and leave them at between 150-160. My questions is what should I do? I will be focusing heavily on making sure the site's content is very targeted and relevant for when Google dynamically generates the descriptions, but should I still edit my descriptions manually?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kenturley2 -
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 -
Should I try to change these links or no?
Hey guys, I need some advice on a link profile I'm currently working on. Our client sells a product in the hunting industry and has been around for over ten years. I just finished up classifying and looking at all of their links today and found that around half of them are sponsor links, links on "link pages," and a few directory links with almost all of them being followed. Because we are the first company to do SEO for them, I know that these aren't maliciously solicited links, but I'm worried that they may be having a negative impact on the site. Most of the links are coming from other non-competing websites in the outdoor industry which typically tends to have very antiquated sites with very antiquated practices. Essentially, I don't want to go out and try to nofollow or disavow all of these links that the website has had for a long time on other related websites if they're helping us, but I also don't want to be leaving anything up that could algorithmically be identified as spam. Below are some examples to show you what I'm referring to by the sponsor links and link resource pages. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks! Sponsored - http://www.becomeabetterhunter.com/ or http://outdoorobsession.tv/ or http://thehollywoodhunter.com/ Link Resource Pages - http://bowhuntamerica.com/links or http://cornerarchery.com/CompanyLinks.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CaddisInteractive0 -
Best solution for facets in ecommerce store for optimum link juice distribution?
Now I have facets setup with ajax and ajax just adding parameter #facet1... at end of URL and I have setup canonical so that domain.com/category/#facet1 refers to
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
domain.com/category/ Would you make the facet links no-follow or better better not to add no-follow for better link juice distribution?
Would you hide the whole facet block from google and if so how? Any thoughts?0 -
Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?
Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this. When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost? We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name). Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
How quickly should you aquire links?
Hi Guys, How often should you aquire links without getting into trouble with Goolge? Should you aqure a linka day? Or a link every 2 days? What should it be? Thanks guys Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GAZ090 -
Dynamic Links vs Static Links
There are under 100 pages that we are trying to rank for and we'd like to flatten our site architecture to give them more link juice. One of the methods that is currently in place now is a widget that dynamically links to these pages based on page popularity...the list of links could change day to day. We are thinking of redesigning the page to become more static, as we believe it's better for link juice to flow to those pages reliably than dynamically. Before we do so, we need a second opinion.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RBA0