Removing unnecessary categories in Ecommerce
-
We're working on a website built in WooCommerce that has 12 products.
Each of the products have URLs like this www.website.com/products/product-name.
We're thinking about removing the /products/ so that they keyword is as close to the left as possible, but came across this page from WooCommerce saying that it could be a bad thing:
http://docs.woothemes.com/document/removing-product-product-category-or-shop-from-the-urls/
Your thoughts? Thanks for the help!
-
Remove the products.. it adds no value. What the article is describing is if you have collisions. Like say you have a "page" in wordpress call "ipod" and you also have a product called "ipod" When you remove the category, everything will be like yoursite.com/ipod so if you have a product named the exact name as a page you will have a collision. Just ensure that you do not have this. SEO ultimate plugin can do this, I use it on my blog for the very same thing with no problems. Or you can manually do the rewrites in the htaccess file.
You absolute best bet since you are not dealing with a lot of products, it sounds like it is a small site, is do it in the middle of the night and do a spider from MOZ and see if it picks up errors.
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
-
Why a certain URL ( a category URL ) disappears?
the page hasn't been spammed. - links are natural - onpage grader is perfect - there are useful high ranking articles linking to the page...pretty much everything is okay.....also all of my websites pages are okay and none of them has disappeared only this one ( the most important category of my site. )
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mohamadalieskandariii0 -
Pagination & View all option on Ecommerce site
Hi I want to add a view all option to our category pages as recommended by Google and to make it easier for the customer. I'm not sure how long this will take our developer, but is this an action that is worth doing from an SEO point of view? Will it add value? For me it will have value, but in terms of SEO actions should it be one I prioritise? I have issues with our pagination and think this would be the quickest way to solve it - http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches Any help appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Google Panda question Category Pages on e-commerce site
Dear Mates, Could you check this category page of our e-commerce site: http://tinyurl.com/zqjalng and give me your opinion about, this is a Panda safe page or not? Actually I have this as NOINDEX preventing any Panda hit, but I'm in doubt. My Question is "Can I index this page again in peace?" Thank you Clay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClayRey0 -
Ranking for homepage & category page?
We lost our Google organic ranking (position 1 - 3) for our highest converting key phrase (cotton tees) in February. The ranking was for our homepage (brandname.com) which is very image heavy and doesn't have much readable content. We noticed that all of our competitors are ranking above us for their category page, not their homepage. The difference between us and our competitors is that we specialize in this key phrase and they just offer one category of the key phrase. For example, we only sell cotton tee's and they sell cotton tees, handbags and shoes. When we dropped we noticed that Google began showing our homepage AND category page in the results, so we pointed our brandname.com to brandname.com/cotton-tees canonically. The idea was that this would assure that the homepage and category page were not competing with each other. The homepage was not really optimized for cotton tees so we thought this might help. 1. Is there any harm in removing the canonical and allowing both pages to rank? (We're also working on redesigning the homepage to add more readable text & optimize for cotton tees.) 2. Our homepage URL used to be "brandname.com/cotton-tees" and we consistenly ranked between 1 and 3 for cotton tees during that time. We modified the homepage URL because it seemed spammy and are now just "brandname.com". Does it make sense to go back to the URL with the key phrase in it if that is our main product and we want to rank for it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EileenCleary0 -
Disavow Links & Paid Link Removal (discussion)
Hey everyone, We've been talking about this issue a bit over the last week in our office, I wanted to extend the idea out to the Moz community and see if anyone has some additional perspective on the issue. Let me break-down the scenario: We're in the process of cleaning-up the link profile for a new client, which contains many low quality SEO-directory links placed by a previous vendor. Recently, we made a connection to a webmaster who controls a huge directory network. This person found 100+ links to our client's site on their network and wants $5/link to have them removed. Client was not hit with a manual penalty, this clean-up could be considered proactive, but an algorithmic 'penalty' is suspected based on historical keyword rankings. **The Issue: **We can pay this ninja $800+ to have him/her remove the links from his directory network, and hope it does the trick. When talking about scaling this tactic, we run into some ridiculously high numbers when you talk about providing this service to multiple clients. **The Silver Lining: **Disavow Links file. I'm curious what the effectiveness of creating this around the 100+ directory links could be, especially since the client hasn't been slapped with a manual penalty. The Debate: Is putting a disavow file together a better alternative to paying for crappy links to be removed? Are we actually solving the bad link problem by disavowing or just patching it? Would choosing not to pay ridiculous fees and submitting a disavow file for these links be considered a "good faith effort" in Google's eyes (especially considering there has been no manual penalty assessed)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Etna0 -
Un Natural Links Removal Strategy
Hi All, I want to discuss one of my strategy that i applied on my website to dilute the value of TOXIC links those are coming on my website. Issue: Poor, Spam quality links were created for the home page and some inner pages. Google considered those links Unnatural and took manual action All rankings were disappeared Strategy Deleted all landing pages those are over linked from spam websites. Created new landing pages with some modifications and new content. Because home page(index.html) was also penalized by Google, i made the changes in index.html and put no follow no index tag so that bad links value couldn't pass from index.html to other inner pages (Newly created pages and pages those were not over optimized). Created new index.php page. Give option to the user to the Enter the Website from Index.html (Default Home Page) to index.php. Blocked all bad URLs (Un Natural Links) through .htaccess file. When user or Google bot will come through those blocked URLs (Un Natural Links), server responses 403 (Access Denied). The domain for which i did above experiment is http://www.thebaildepot.com/index.php Now, i have doubts on below points: Blocking unnatural links (403, access denied) from .htaccess file will really work? No follow no index to default page and than give option to the user to navigate to newly create index.php I did this experiment around 10 days before still rankings are not coming in Google top 100.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RuchiPardal0 -
Optimize the category page or a content page?
Hi, We wish to start ranking on a specific keyword ("log house prices" in italian). We have two options on what pages we should optimize for this keyword: A long content page (1000+ words with images) Log houses category page, optimized for the keyword (we have 50+ houses on this page, together with a short price summary). I would think that we have better chances with ranking with option nr.2 , but then we can't use that page for ranking with a more short-tail keyword (like "log houses"). What would you suggest? Is there maybe a third option for this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohanMattisson0 -
How to remove duplicate content, which is still indexed, but not linked to anymore?
Dear community A bug in the tool, which we use to create search-engine-friendly URLs (sh404sef) changed our whole URL-structure overnight, and we only noticed after Google already indexed the page. Now, we have a massive duplicate content issue, causing a harsh drop in rankings. Webmaster Tools shows over 1,000 duplicate title tags, so I don't think, Google understands what is going on. <code>Right URL: abc.com/price/sharp-ah-l13-12000-btu.html Wrong URL: abc.com/item/sharp-l-series-ahl13-12000-btu.html (created by mistake)</code> After that, we ... Changed back all URLs to the "Right URLs" Set up a 301-redirect for all "Wrong URLs" a few days later Now, still a massive amount of pages is in the index twice. As we do not link internally to the "Wrong URLs" anymore, I am not sure, if Google will re-crawl them very soon. What can we do to solve this issue and tell Google, that all the "Wrong URLs" now redirect to the "Right URLs"? Best, David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rmvw0