Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Two Pages with the Same Name Different URL's
-
I was hoping someone could give me some insight into a perplexing issue that I am having with my website. I run an 20K product ecommerce website and I am finding it necessary to have two pages for my content: 1 for content category pages about wigets one for shop pages for wigets
1st page would be .com/shop/wiget/
2nd page would be .com/content/wiget/
The 1st page would be a catalogue of all the products with filters for the customer to narrow down wigets. So ultimately the URL for the shop page could look like this when the customer filters down...
.com/shop/wiget/color/shape/
The second page would be content all about the Wigets. This would be types of wigets colors of wigets, how wigets are used, links to articles about wigets etc.
Here are my questions.
1. Is it bad to have two pages about wigets on the site, one for shopping and one for information. The issue here is when I combine my content wiget with my shop wiget page, no one buys anything. But I want to be able to provide Google the best experience for rankings. What is the best approach for Google and the customer?
2. Should I rel canonical all of my .com/shop/wiget/ + .com/wiget/color/ etc. pages to the .com/content/wiget/ page? Or, Should I be canonicalizing all of my .com/shop/wiget/color/etc pages to .com/shop/wiget/ page?
3. Ranking issues. As it is right now, I rank #1 for wiget color. This page on my site would be .com/shop/wiget/color/ . If I rel canonicalize all of my pages to .com/content/wiget/ I am going to loose my rankings because all of my shop/wiget/xxx/xxx/ pages will then point to .com/content/wiget/ page.
I am just finding with these massive ecommerce sites that there is WAY to much potential for duplicate content, not enough room to allow Google the ability to rank long tail phrases all the while making it completely complicated to offer people pages that promote buying.
As I said before, when I combine my content + shop pages together into one page, my sales hit the floor (like 0 - 15 dollars a day), when i just make a shop page my sales are like (1k+ a day). But I have noticed that ever since Penguin and Panda my rankings have fallen from #1 across the board to #15 and lower for a lot of my phrase with the exception of the one mentioned above. This is why I want to make an information page about wigets and a shop page for people to buy wigets.
Please advise if you would. Thanks so much for any insight you can give me!
-
The main reason that I have two pages about Wigets is due in part to the shopping experience.
If someone comes to my page, the last things they want to do is read a whole bunch of "googley goop" about Wigets. I know, sounds crazy, but the truth is in the putting.
I have served up filter pages with widgets on them, and I have served up pages with widgets + content about widgets on them, and i have servered up only pages about widgets with links out to widget filter pages. The best performing pages are those with only a vast amount of widgets (little pictures and micro descriptions) on them. My customers just want to browse browse browse, they dont want to read any thing. Call me crazy
That being the case, this does not make for a good landing page for Google for so many reasons be it duplicate content, lack of unique content etc. Google wants unique quality content, and my landing page about widgets (the page with just a bunch of squares each containing a widget and micro content such as name and color) just does not suffice. Keep in mind I have over 20K widgets on my site.
That is the reason why it is very necessary for me to have a page about widgets and a shopping page showing all the variety of widgets in all their shapes and colors.
The content page is all about widgets, how their are made, sizes, colors, links to articles etc. If I were to put this on the widget shopping page, I can kiss all my sales goodbye. The reason I know this is because I have done it and this was the reward I received from my customers. My customers only want to browse and shop widgets and the Google gods want content about widgets, not just a collection widgets on a page, because everyone else is doing that. I have actually created lots of content pages about my widgets with amazing content. No one else has this, that is why I need two pages.
Thus my dilema which I spoke of before in my original post.
Any suggestions are welcome
Cheers!
-
The first question I would have is why?
"The issue here is when I combine my content widget with my shop widget page, no one buys anything."
You can include all of your content on the shop page and hide it in a jquery and the shop page would look almost identical to how it is now, but that page would rank because of the content and the user would be one click closer to the purchase than if they were to land on the information page first.
I would suggest doing that and only having one page per product with the information on the page in a way that does not negatively impact conversion rates. Some a/b testing may be in order, A/B testing is always in order anyway for conversion pages
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
-
Should I include URLs that are 301'd or only include 200 status URLs in my sitemap.xml?
I'm not sure if I should be including old URLs (content) that are being redirected (301) to new URLs (content) in my sitemap.xml. Does anyone know if it is best to include or leave out 301ed URLs in a xml sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
Replace dynamic paramenter URLs with static Landing Page URL - faceted navigation
Hi there, got a quick question regarding faceted navigation. If a specific filter (facet) seems to be quite popular for visitors. Does it make sense to replace a dynamic URL e.x http://www.domain.com/pants.html?a_type=239 by a static, more SEO friendly URL e.x http://www.domain.com/pants/levis-pants.html by creating a proper landing page for it. I know, that it is nearly impossible to replace all variations of this parameter URLs by static ones but does it generally make sense to do this for the most popular facets choose by visitors. Or does this cause any issues? Any help is much appreciated. Thanks a lot in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ennovators0 -
Using Canonical URL to poin to an external page
I was wondering if I can use a canonical URL that points to a page residing on external site? So a page like:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | llamb
www.site1.com/whatever.html will have a canonical link in its header to www.site2.com/whatever.html. Thanks.0 -
Putting "noindex" on a page that's in an iframe... what will that mean for the parent page?
If I've got a page that is being called in an iframe, on my homepage, and I don't want that called page to be indexed.... so I put a noindex tag on the called page (but not on the homepage) what might that mean for the homepage? Nothing? Will Google, Bing, Yahoo, or anyone else, potentially see that as a noindex tag on my homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Philip-DiPatrizio0 -
Soft 404's from pages blocked by robots.txt -- cause for concern?
We're seeing soft 404 errors appear in our google webmaster tools section on pages that are blocked by robots.txt (our search result pages). Should we be concerned? Is there anything we can do about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline4 -
Adding index.php at the end of the url effect it's rankings
I have just had my site updated and we have put index.php at the end of all the urls. Not long after the sites rankings dropped. Checking the backlinks, they all go to (example) http://www.website.com and not http://www.website.com/index.php. So could this change have effected rankings even though it redirects to the new url?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | authoritysitebuilder0 -
Does Google crawl the pages which are generated via the site's search box queries?
For example, if I search for an 'x' item in a site's search box and if the site displays a list of results based on the query, would that page be crawled? I am asking this question because this would be a URL that is non existent on the site and hence am confused as to whether Google bots would be able to find it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseseo0 -
Tool to calculate the number of pages in Google's index?
When working with a very large site, are there any tools that will help you calculate the number of links in the Google index? I know you can use site:www.domain.com to see all the links indexed for a particular url. But what if you want to see the number of pages indexed for 100 different subdirectories (i.e. www.domain.com/a, www.domain.com/b)? is there a tool to help automate the process of finding the number of pages from each subdirectory in Google's index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0