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.
Blog is outranking ecommerce store
-
My client has a blog that posts information about products to support its ecommerce store.
The blog's main purpose is to support the products listed on the main website, but it has become so strong that its posts sometimes rank in the SERPS in place of the website product page, which is undesirable.
The blog posts always link to the product that they are supporting. Are there any other methods, other than doing a 301, that could help the product page to rank instead of the blog post?
-
Thanks Doug,
I will perhaps try having the links removed from the product page and see if that helps.
-
Without taking a look at the site and the content you've got it's hard to talk specifics, but you might want to test removing the links from the product pages to the blog. After all, you want people to add the products to their cart - not drift off into the blog.
(Of course. Depends on how well the blog supports people purchasing decisions, and promotes your offerings etc,)
In one of your response to Greg you say: "if there are not many reviews available for a product but my client has reviewed the product and posted it to their blog, Google will prefer that to the product page itself."
This makes me suspect that it's just the weight of relevant copy on the page that's causing Google to view the blog page as more authoritative. I'd also guess (gut feeling) that having links from your product pages to your blog is also going to make is less clear to Google which should be the authoritative page.
-
It's possible that we could add the content to the product pages. Perhaps it could be added to the product page first and then posted to the blog with the website being specified as the canonical link.
-
Thanks for the suggestions about analysing the different traffic once it lands on the product pages, I hadn't thought of that.
The setup is that content is added to the blog and linked back to the relevant product page. The blog content is tagged with the name of the product and then any content with the specified tag appears on the product page via an rss feed for that tag.
You're right about different stages of the buying cycle and this is why the supporting content is posted. We have tested some CTA banners with reasonable success but need to find a successful way to implement this feature in wordpress without adding an image file each time.
-
Nope content is written afresh and not copied at all from manufacturers.
There is the option for customers to leave reviews, although currently no scheme.org markup to add it to the metadata.
What makes you think that a 301 to the product pages will stop them from being indexed. I have 301'd other pages in the past without it casing problems?
-
I'm not sure what's causing the blog posts to outrank - in most cases it is the other way around. I think Google just prefers certain type of content in some instances - e.g if there are not many reviews available for a product but my client has reviewed the product and posted it to their blog, Google will prefer that to the product page itself.
-
This is a nice problem to have.
Think of the blog page as a landing page and as Robert suggested, link to the product so they can buy.
I'm curious how the keywords differ for each page. Whatever is being done on the blog pages successfully - can you do similar things to product pages that are not being blogged?
-
One solution would be to put this supporting information onto the product pages (and 301) but...
This might be more of an opportunity than a problem!
Not everyone searching for a product is actually looking to buy now. Recognising that different people will be in different stages of the buying cycle and creating content to support and more these people towards your sales pages.
Make sure that your blog posts also sell - both the products and also your offering/usp.
As well as just having a link - make sure it's an obvious call to action with a clear proposition too. if they want to go ahead any buy the product - give them a reason why they should buy from you.
Your blog posts might provide you with a great opportunity to communicate the added value, authority and trust in your brand to your prospective customer.
As well as having a link at the bottom - make sure that you've also got a clear and obvious "looking to buy now?" CTA above the fold for those competitive/impulsive people who do want to buy now!
What's happening when people arrive on your blog pages, how long so they spend on them, are they moving on to your product pages?
Is there a difference in the conversion rate for people entering via the blog and going on to your product page vs those that arrive directly on your product pages?
-
If the product descriptions are more or less copied from the manufacturer, then you may need to rewrite them and find ways to add user-generated content there, e.g. ratings and reviews, etc.
If you 301 the blog pages, then there won't be a blog to read and Google won't index the product pages.
-
What's causing the blog posts to rank above the product pages? Better information? More in-depth photos? Reviews? More content in general? If it's any of these, then think about you can apply these positives to the product pages so people start sharing and linking to those more.
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 move my blog from subdomain to subdirectory?
Hi there, We have a pretty strong organic presence on our consumer facing blog. Around 5.7 million organic clicks Year to Date. It's currently housed in Wordpress on a subdomain. Our team is considering migrating our blog from Wordpress to Sitecore, where our parent organization resides. With that consideration, we're trying to determine if we should preserve the subdomain or move to a subdirectory of the parent brand. Moving to the parent brand would also result in a loss of our custom global nav - we would inherit the global nav of the parent website. We're not concerned about traffic loss risk - we know that we'll lose some but we think the move to subdirectory might be more beneficial in the long run from an SEO perspective. We're mostly concerned about the users getting lost without the global nav specific to the blog. Thoughts/concerns? Thank you!
Web Design | | Jessdyl0 -
Do Wordpress sites outrank SquareSpace?
I was a big fan of Wordpress. I used it for 10 years. However, because I run a very small business, the constant upkeep needed on WP in the end started to frustrate me in the end, so I moved to SquareSpace. However, I am beginning to question my decision, as one of my sites is struggling really badly, and I mean badly. The other sites are okay. So I started asking around, and most people are saying there shouldn't be a difference. A few people have said their Wordpress sites always outranks their SquareSpace sites. Then I read what Rand Fishkin said in the below Twitter thread, now I am even more confused. I am very reluctant to move to Wordpress, its just so much hassle. But at the same time, if a site doesn't get much traffic then it's useless. https://twitter.com/drew_pickard/status/991659074134556673 https://twitter.com/randfish/status/991974456477278209 Please let me know your thoughts and experience.
Web Design | | RyanUK0 -
Does the blog widget with latest blog-posts at homepage helps in SEO?
Hi all, We are planning to add a widget at our website homepage which displays recent blog-posts with dates. Google favours new and latest content. So will these consistent new posts help in improving website ranking? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Moving to new site. Should I take old blog posts with me?
Our company website has needed a complete overhaul for some time now and the new one is almost ready to go live. We also have a separate "news" site that is houses around 800 blog posts and news items. (That news site will be thrown away because it's on a completely different domain and causes confusion.) So we have a main site with about 100 decent blog posts and a separate news site with 800 poor posts. I plan on bringing all the main site blog posts over to the new site (both WordPress), but my question is whether or not to bring over the news site posts? All, handful, none? Another issue is the news site doesn't have Google Analytics, so I'm not sure if any posts actually generate traffic, but I can from the main site we do get some referrals from it. As far as quality of content goes, it's poor. Not sure who wrote it all, but it's mainly text press releases that aren't very interesting. Is it worth bringing over for SEO purposes or simply delete the site and create a mass redirect so all of those pages will direct to the new website's blog page? Any help is greatly appreciated.
Web Design | | codyfrew0 -
E-Commerce Website Architecture - Cannibalization between Product Categories and Blog Categories?
Hi, I have an e-commerce site that sells laptops. My main landing pages and category pages are as follows:
Web Design | | BeytzNet
"Toshiba Laptops", "Samsung Laptops", etc. We also run a WP blog with industry news.
The posts are divided into categories which are basically as our landing pages.
The posts themselves usually link to the appropriate e-commerce landing page.
For example: a post about a new Samsung Laptop which is categorized in the blog under "Samsung Laptops" will naturally link somewhere inside to the "samsung laptops" ecommerce landing page. Is that good or do the categories on the blog cannibalize my more important e-commerce section landing pages? Thanks0 -
Creating Print Catalog From Ecommerce Product Database
I have seen some kind of free online software that lets you create product catalog layouts based on your ecommerce product database but I can't remember the name of company or the url of their site? Anyone heard of this?
Web Design | | larahill1 -
Infinite Scrolling vs. Pagination on an eCommerce Site
My company is looking at replacing our ecommerce site's paginated browsing with a Javascript infinite scroll function for when customers view internal search results--and possibly when they browse product categories also. Because our internal linking structure isn't very robust, I'm concerned that removing the pagination will make it harder to get the individual product pages to rank in the SERPs. We have over 5,000 products, and most of them are internally linked to from the browsing results pages in the category structure: e.g. Blue Widgets, Widgets Under $250, etc. I'm not too worried about removing pagination from the internal search results pages, but I'm concerned that doing the same for these category pages will result in de-linking the thousands of product pages that show up later in the browsing results and therefore won't be crawlable as internal links by the Googlebot. Does anyone have any ideas on what to do here? I'm already arguing against the infinite scroll, but we're a fairly design-driven company and any ammunition or alternatives would really help. For example, would serving a different page to the Googlebot in this case be a dangerous form of cloaking? (If the only difference is the presence of the pagination links.) Or is there any way to make rel=next and rel=prev tags work with infinite scrolling?
Web Design | | DownPour0 -
WordPress blog hosted on GoDaddy domain mapping help
We set up a WP blog that's hosted through GoDaddy. For various reasons, we purchased a URL to use to get through the technical build and set up and are trying to map that to a subdomain of our company website. (We can't host it on our own server, unfortunately). My question is: for WP blogs hosted via WP you can buy a domain mapping upgrade and I'm trying to find a similar plugin that could offer the same thing that would apply to our GoDaddy hosting and point to our subdomain (GD apparently doesn't offer the domain mapping). Anyone have any thoughts, please?
Web Design | | josh-riley0