Really bad technical SEO and Nofollow

[runnerkik]

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?

[orion68]

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.

[DarinPirkey]

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.

[runnerkik]

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.

[runnerkik]

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.

[runnerkik]

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.

[CMC-SD]

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.

[DarinPirkey]

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.

[Asher]

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.

[irvingw]

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.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

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