Really bad technical SEO and Nofollow
-
I posted a question week ago about a client with really awful SEO errors to the tune of over 75k violations including massive duplicate content (over 8000 pages) and pages with too many links (homepage alone has over 300 links), and I was thinking, why not try to nofollow the product pages which are the ones causing so many issue. They have super low domain authority, and are wasting spider energy, have no incoming links. Thoughts? BTW the entire site is an ecommerce site wth millions of products and each product is its own wordpress blog post...YIKES! Thoughts?
-
hi,
there are thousands of ecommerce sites with over 200 or 300 links on their home page and they perform pretty well with no fluctuations in their traffic throughout years.
Just a thought.
-
For the record, I've worked on a site with the Yoast plugin that had 260k product "post" items and we showed no duplicate content errors when I left.
-
Oh I guess I should add some other answers - the 75k errors are really every single issue, minor or major according to Microsofts 2007 SEO toolkit - from the MOZ I get over 8000 crawl errors , 31k in warnings and 2k in notices as far as the errors the vast majority is dup page content and for the warnings over 9k are too many links and 3k in overly dynamic urls. The old SEO person I took over from had installed the SEO toolkit I believe - and checked the conical link ad in the notices on the moz I see 1733 of those.
admittedly the technical side of seo is my weakness - surprise surprise, I am sure I am not unique. I can say what to do but how to do it is sometimes hard for me to describe esp in wordpress.
-
Oh I guess I should add some other answers - the 75k errors are really every single issue, minor or major according to Microsofts 2007 SEO toolkit - from the MOZ I get over 8000 crawl errors , 31k in warnings and 2k in notices as far as the errors the vast majority is dup page content and for the warnings over 9k are too many links and 3k in overly dynamic urls. The old SEO person I took over from had installed the SEO toolkit I believe - and checked the conical link ad in the notices on the moz I see 1733 of those.
admittedly the technical side of seo is my weakness - surprise surprise, I am sure I am not unique. I can say what to do but how to do it is sometimes hard for me to describe esp in wordpress.
-
Thanks everyone...and the cononical tagging IMO is the best bet here, and I totally agree that the Yoast plugin looks like the best thing to help with that task but to be honest I am super afraid it will break the website. And yes, no index is what I meant, so meat to say Noindex and follow in the meta tags - and/or using cononical URL priority setting in the meta tags where ever I can.
Migrating is in the plan - I am just impatient and I have been only link building to the homepage in the meantime, but even that is a challenge because obviously I feel like I have to do it 2000 times over to add value.
-
I agree that this may require a migration. Not only will the e-commerce work better for your client, but you'll be able to get things right from the ground up. Or at least more right. All the usual e-commerce platforms have their SEO problems, but it sounds like basically anything would be better than this.
-
Wow....where to begin...
Where are the 75k violations coming from (SEOmoz, Google, etc)?
To you comment: "(homepage alone has over 300 links)"
Google has in it's Webmaster Guidelines that you use around 100 or less links on a given page
To your comment: "each product is its own wordpress blog"
If everything is a Wordpress Post you should be able to canonical all those pages pretty easily. I use the Yoast Plugin for Wordpress SEO. It's amazing what it can do. All you have to do is install it and go to that post and set up the advance portion of the plugin to canonical to the appropriate page.
To your comment: "why not try to nofollow the product pages which are the ones causing so many issue"
This should be resolved with the aforementioned canonical recommendation.
As far as links on a page, I'm a fan of only having links on a page that are are logical or "relevant" next steps for the user. If my page is about baby shampoo, links to shopping cart, contact us and main things are relevant; but so are towels, bathtubs, baby soap, etc. Try to keep the links to a minimum and really try to help the user.
Have you guys submitted your products to Google Product Feed? That may help with traffic too.
I could keep writing for hours but it's a start.
-
Have you considered consolidating the pages? What I mean by that, is if each product has its own wp post then how about sorting it by color, so yellow shirt and blue shirt don't have separate post but one posts with a variation tool within to delineate the colors. Then 301 redirect those old permalinks to the new one? Also, it might be time for a migration like irving weiss said, in which case I would recommend Magento as your eCommerce platform.
-
nofollowing the links won't stop the spiders from finding those pages, that will only throw away your PR. block them out in robots.txt, noindex and/or canonical the duplicate content pages to reign in the number of pages instead.
I would look at the navigational structure and see if you can narrow down the hierarchy a bit if there are 300 links on each page, it's a bit overwhelming for the user. Link to main category pages and on those pages branch out to individual products or sub categories.
"BTW the entire site is an ecommerce site wth millions of products and each product is its own wordpress blog post...YIKES! Thoughts?" I think wordpress is the wrong platform for a large ecommerce site with a million products and a migration might be in order which is a huge undertaking. You must have tons of duplicate title tags and junk on this site, it's inevitable when creating so many pages.
-
Read this post by Matt Cutts on nofollow and pagerank sculpting
Essentially, you still divide your link authority between the total number of links on the page (including nofollowed links) and only pass authority to the followed links.
So you still pass just as much authority to the links that are followed while reducing the authority to the newly nofollowed link (which doesn't fix your situation from what I can tell).
You can possibly noindex the duplicate pages? I'd have to see specifics before I can say for sure.
Best course of action is a navigation restructure (maybe even site if each product is a post (timely)... should at least be a page(timeless)).
Good luck!
Oleg
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
-
Multi Store SEO Drop
I have two stores (thespacecollective.com and thespacecollective.com/us) and over the past month the keyword rank for the US store had dropped by half, while the UK store is relatively the same. The content is mostly the same, except the US site uses US spelling. I assumed that this would not be flagged as duplicate content because it is the same site, just serving two locations. I'd be interested to hear some thoughts on the reason for this drop and how I might fix it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Changing categorisation effect on SEO
Hi I work on an ecommerce shop & we've discussed changing some of out categories. We have one named cupboards & lockers, but want to split this out, so we have Cupboards then Lockers so customers can browse through our main navigation like this. For SEO I know initially our rankings will be affected, but long term moving categories up a level will be an improvement & will be more relevant - has anyone does this before and could provide any advice? Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Looking for SEO advice on Negative SEO attack. Technical SEO
please see this link https://www.dropbox.com/s/thgy57zmmwzodcp/Screenshot 2016-05-31 13.25.23.png?dl=0 you can see my domain is getting tons of chinese spam. I have 410'd the page but it still keeps coming.. 7tnawRV
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mattguitar990 -
Looking for Adult SEO company
Hi guys and girls, I am looking for a company that is willing to work with us to improve our SEO. Our website is www.reallovesexdolls.com and we keep on going all the way UP to fall rock bottom hard again (like waves in the ocean). It's really weird, we never invested much in link building and such. We are so busy with other things that it would be nice to outsource this task. You can contact us by phone, or by email. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MartinePeters0 -
Brand sections performing badly in SERP's but all SEO tools think we are great
I have had this problem for some time now and I've asked many many experts. Search for Falke in Google.co.uk and this is what you get: http://www.sockshop.co.uk/by_brand/falke/ 3rd Our competitor
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jpbarber
http://www.mytights.com/gb/brand/falke.html 4th Our competitor http://www.uktights.com/section/73/falke 104th this is us ????? 9th for Falke tights with same section not our falke tights section? All sites seem to link to their brand sections in the same way with links in the header and breadcrumbs, Opensite exporler only shows 2 or 3 internal links for our compertitors, 1600+ from us?
Many of our brand sections rank badly Pretty Polly and Charnos brands rank page 2 or 3 with a brand subsection with no links to them, main section dosn't rank? Great example is Kunert, a German brand no UK competition our section has been live for 8 years, the best we can do is 71st Google UK, 1st on Bing (as we should be). I'm working on adding some quality links, but our comtetitors have a few low quality or no external links, only slightly better domain authority but rank 100+ positions better than us on some brands. This to me would suggest there is something onpage / internal linking I'm doing wrong, but all tools say "well done, grade A" take a holiday. Keyword denisty is similar to our competiors and I've tried reducing the number of products on the page. All pages really ranked well pre Penguin, and Bing still likes them. This is driving me nuts and costing us money Cheers Jonathan
www.uktights.com1 -
SEO for eCommerce?
I'm working on a game plan for the on-page optimization for a growing e-commerce site (https://www.boutine.com) and I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with similar projects. Specifically, how to get the most SEO value out of product and category pages. Thanks in advance! -Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boutine0 -
Advice on further SEO
I am frustrated by a lack of progress for a major keyword I want to rank for. I have made several pages, optimized with Onpage and even a whole site but I can't seem to get my ratings up. I am hoping somone can take a look at my pages and efforts and offer me some advice... Keyword is "National Currency" One site is devoted to this keyword: NationalCurrencyValues This site is ranked 30th and is down 9... and this page on another site is devoted to the same keyword ranked 26th is: http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/National-Currency.aspx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Banknotes0 -
Is IP trust a factor in SEO
Hi If my website is on an IP address that has a bad reputation with AOL for email, would Google use that as a factor in where they place us in SERPs? If so, what should I do? Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | usedcarexpert0