Please help me articulate why broken pagination is bad for SEO...
-
Hi fellow Mozzers.
I am in need of assistance. Pagination is and has been broken on the Website for which I do SEO in-house...and it's been broken for years.
Here is an example: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/audio-technica
This category has 122 products, broken down to display 24 at a time across paginated results. However, you will notice that once you enter pagination, all of the URLs become this: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher
Even if you hit "Previous" or "Next" or your browser back button, the URL stays: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher
I have tried to explain to stakeholders that this is a lost opportunity. That if a user or Google were to find that a particular paginated result contained a unique combination of products that might be more relevant to a searcher's search than the main page in the series, Google couldn't send the searcher to that page because it didn't have a unique URL. In addition, this non-unique URL most likely is bottle-necking the flow of page authority internally because it isn't unique. This is not to mention that 38% of our traffic in Google Analytics is being reported as coming from this page...a problem because this page could be one of several hundred on the site and we have no idea which one a visitor was actually looking at.
How do I articulate the magnitude of this problem for SEO? Is there a way I can easily put it in dollars and cents for a business person who really thinks SEOs are a bunch of snake oil salesmen in the first place?
Does anyone have any before and after case studies or quantifiable data that they would be willing to share with me (even privately) that can help me articulate better how important it is to address this problem. Even more, what can we hope to get out of fixing it? More traffic, more revenue, higher conversions?
Can anyone help me go to the mat with a solid argument as to why pagination should be addressed?
-
Thanks so much Gianluca for this thoughtful and valuable advice.
Yes, page load speed is definitely something that's been a concern. This is why we went back to 24 products displayed per page instead of 50 a few months ago. However, since then we've made some significant improvements in page load times and we think we can probably go up to 100 products per page and still be fairly fast. We will have to test.
On the up side, we only have 7 categories with more than 100 products, and only 24 with more than 50. The biggest problem we have effecting speed isn't so much the images. It's the fact that the website does real-time pricing calls on every product to ou business back end every time the page loads. This may be a sticking point.
I have also thought about the canonical tag problem. Of course, it's a problem now too, but if the "View All" page just ends up getting that generic URL and no proper canonical tag...then we really are back to square one.
The possibility of no-indexing all of the categories that are related to paginated series is something that crossed my mind yesterday, so it's interesting that you mentioned that. While it would solve certain issues, wouldn't this be a problem in terms of having valuable content in Google? Granted, some of our category pages are purely there for navigation purposes, in which case, I suppose there's no harm in no-indexing them. However, with the roll-out of Hummingbird I began looking at our category pages as valuable opportunities for "topics" pages that could act as a hub for visitors searching for products or information around specific uses or brands.
Wouldn't there be a significant risk in losing valuable market share for key terms by removing so many category pages from Google's index?
If I am understanding your last suggestion you are saying to have the page default to "View All" and noindex everything else...You are right, not a great scenario, but you are also right in that this may be the only solution given management's steadfast stance on not wanting to pay to fix it.
Lot's to think about, but your comment has been extremely helpful. Thanks again!
-
Dana,
just few tips about the view all option.
While it surely is the best solution, even when a real pagination exists, you should always remember few things:
- a view all list with tens of snippets (photo + text + link) can be like a block of reinforced concrete for the PageSpeed of your site: imagine those listings with 100+ products.
In that case using a view all can be not the correct solution, because googlebot won't ever be able to go through all the code and give up following all the URLs present in the view all page.
-
in fact, the ideal should be having a view all page uploading completely within 4 seconds
-
for that reason, if the only solution you have is having a view all page, then you should seriously thinking in implementing the lazy loading for the images, so that the written content (links included) will have priority in rendering and Google will see them all, and images are uploaded only when needed (i.e.: when the users, scrolling down, arrives to the image that must appear).
Then, there's doubt - a big one: if the paginated list always have this URL http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher, how can you put as its canonical the view all of http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/audio-adapters-audio-connectors when it should have also as canonical http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/audio-technica?
Maybe the only solution you have is this:
-
forcing that the view all URL is the default one;
-
all the paginated pages (also the the first page) are noindex
Not really a wonderful solution, but - from what I understood about the stubborness of your bosses - the only one. But one that must be executed properly in order to avoid worse issues.
-
....is like hiring an astronaut, handing them a box of toothpicks and some gunpowder and saying you expect them to land on the moon
ha ha ha... that is really funny.
Thanks for the laugh.
-
Thanks so much EGOL. I always love your candor.
Believe me, when I went home last night to ponder solutions to this problem, everything you mentioned crossed my mind. It was a thoroughly frustrating conversation to have. It simply amazes me that Google can tell the world very clearly all the things that will help their sites do better in the SERPs, yet people continue to ignore all of that advice, do what they want (or whatever is "easy" or cheap), and then whine about why their sites aren't doing well.
Making the commitment to hire an in-house SEO without equipping them with good tools and refusing to take their advice is like hiring an astronaut, handing them a box of toothpicks and some gunpowder and saying you expect them to land on the moon.
-
Thanks so much Andy. Agreed on all points. I think I have convinced the powers that be that at the very least we should add a "View All" option. This would give both end-users and Google a useful means to access all of the products in a category at once, without having to resort to pagination if they didn't want to. It is something we can add fairly easily and at little to no cost. Since only 8 of our category pages have more than 100 products, and none go higher than 200, this seems like a very reasonable compromise, at least for now.
I very much appreciate you taking the time to respond It was a frustrating day and a frustrating conversation to have to have.
-
I don't have an answer for you... but I will say that it would really bother me that I would have to jump through hoops with a pogo stick to get stakeholders to want to address this.
I'll skip my rant and get right to the analysis.....
What's going on? Are these stakeholders: A) dumb? B) lazy? C) short of resources? D) frying bigger fish?
If it is A or B then I am probably looking for another job before the company goes bankrupt.
If it is D then I might decide if I should resign and go into competition with them to cash in on the bonanza.
If it is C then you have a dilema that could involve going to the stakeholders boss, other creative solutions or looking for a new job.
Really, you should not have to ask this question.
-
Hi Dana,
I can certainly understand your problem, and whilst I have no data to give you, you should certainly be looking at this not only as a lost opportunity from and SEO perspective, but also as the inability to report back just how well the site is converting traffic. Without this data, no site can see where changes can be made and where improvements will result to an increase in revenue.
I would also look at the fact that anything that is broken on a site might not be having an observable negative issue right now, but what happens with the next algorithm update? Will something be spotted at some point? Do you want to wait for Google to penalise the site before realising it should have been corrected?
Also, does it make for a poor user experience? If someone comes to the site and then bookmarks of of these pages, how are they going to get back again? Are they then likely to just navigate away because they didn't land where they intended.
I am sure there will be a loss in revenue from this - quantifying it will be difficult for an outsider though. There is no doubt that this should be resolved, and I would say ASAP as well.
-Andy
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
-
New To SEO Management, I just want to double check that my idea will work.
I am new to SEO management. I had a 3 month SEO copy writing internship and a 5 month SEO temp job. In both I mostly wrote copy, but I've been teaching myself SEO on the side, I became Google certified. I ended up getting a telemarketing job and somehow the conversation of SEO came up and I winded up managing their SEO for 12 dollars an hour. They say that every lead generated from the website that turns into a sale will be worth 10 dollars and if and when the sales exceed my paycheck I will starting making commission so long as it stays above my hourly. SEO is very fun and this is like my dream job. They are leaving the planning 100% up to me and I want to make sure that what I am doing will work. My plan is as follows: Part 1: Page Authority via backlinks and social media We are health care brokers and my boss, the owner has a lot of contact. He is talking with large unions like, "The Teamsters," and large company retirment groups like, "Blue flame," which is apparently in some way connected to DTE or GE. Long story short, I am trying to get him to convince them to give us a back link to our main page. He also has a ton of clients that own companies. This is good because they may be persuaded to give us backlinks too. In addition, the tech guy thinks he can implement something where we can get a google +1, facebooks likes/shares, twitter likes and shares and pintrest pin it's that would be a part of an email that we send to people within the list of 12,000 clients. From what I can see, from the client base and the people we are working with we should be able to raise the page authority substantially despite the fact that the site is only a few months old and is not yet out of the sand box. I have been slowly picking off each error with SEO MOZ's website crawling. Part 2: Making a Insurance Jargon Dictionary Guide For The Tri-purpose of gathering traffic, proving our professionalism and helping people understand semi-complex insurance jargon. I could build these 2-3 keywords would be addressed per page and they would be defined in a way to help people looking for terms understand them, while simultaneously netting a strong keyword density and a strong page. I think as far as I can tell there are no issues. Part 3: The dictionary pages will pull in new traffic and the home page will receive links and distribute link juice to the sub-pages. This subpages will guide traffic back to the main page with no-follow links to direct people from the unique termed landing pages to the home page for insurance processing. As far as I can tell my logic is solid and on paper this should work. Am I missing anything (like key details, flaws in my plan)?
Web Design | | Tediscool0 -
Are wordpress themes like from themeforest bad?
Hi to all. Ok so as I read around the internet I see a lot of people who dislike theme forest and using their themes. I have a them from them, the Avada theme. Ok so they have made a TON of money. But would so many people buy the theme if it was that bad? Going forward, my question is, are wordpress themes a bad thing to do? I feel like its peer pressure to switch to a framework like Genesis. There are so many people who state that a framework and child theme is the way to go. But I am using this avada theme and having under 2.5 sec load times. A lot of people say the code is bloated and is horrible. I understand this and got a cache plugin that makes a huge difference. But I do want to learn and I do want to approach websites in a positive way. So if you have any thoughts on themes, please tell me your thoughts. I am no developer, so they seem to work, but is it at a price? Like bad seo and serps? Thank you chris
Web Design | | asbchris0 -
3 Ecommerce Stores All Under One Roof - Good idea? SEO Benefits? Concerns?
I run multiple ecommerce stores in one particular market. I've been considering merging them all together and using a Single sign-on and allowing users to swap between websites. Each site is unique in their own way and are already ranking well on their own. But the goal is to merge them altogether to create a better user-flow. An example of what I'm trying to do is what Zurb.com does (http://zurb.com/apps). They have all of their different products but they're under different domains. Another example is http://www.envato.com/sites and all of their brands to their sites. Will this negatively impact SEO efforts across the board or will we eventually benefit from merging them. Also, is there a correct way to do this. For example; Should I make one site the "parent website" and then create sub-directories of the other websites and work on the DNS to point to the right locations. I'm not the technical person on our team but I do lead the marketing and I can't find the right answer for this question.
Web Design | | venturagroup0 -
Will keyword optimization for a landing page impact SEO for subsequent pages?
For example, if I optimize keyword “pleurx” really well on our landing page, I'd like to know if subsequent
Web Design | | Todd_Kendrick
pages linking back to that landing page will rank higher than before for “pleurx”
even if “pleurx” wasn't optimized on the subsequent pages. Thanks! -Andrew0 -
On site SEO opinions
Hi all, I have been testing different configurations for my on-site SEO for a while now and I think I am pretty much there. However it is always nice to know what other SEO's think about my keyword density and usage. My site is http://www.tomlondonmagic.com I am curious as to what you think regarding landing page content, whether you need lots or text or little text? I have just removed links in the text as I feel I want to keep as much juice on my landing page as possible. Thanks all!
Web Design | | TomLondon0 -
Html 5 main and secondary navigation for SEO best performances
I am building a website which will have a main navigation related to the site and each link of the main navigation will have a secondary navigation. We do not want to use a megamenu style navigation. I will try to explain it with a example: Let's start with an example for a computer store "My PC Store", the Main Navigation would be: Desktop PC's Notebook & Tablets
Web Design | | netbuilder
Multimedia When clicking on the "Notebook & Tablets" the user is directed to the page domain.com/notebook-tablet.html and on this page the secondary navigation appears: Laptop Netbook Tablets / iPad I am confused on how I should organize the semantic navigation for best SEO performances and I need advice / suggestions. I thought about 2 different ways to do it but which one is more appropriate in terms of SEO? PROPOSITION A Home Page: <header> My PC Store <nav> Desktop PC's Notebook & Tablets Multimedia </nav> </header> Sub-Page (Notebook & Tablets): <nav>(or <aside>?) Desktop PC's Notebook & Tablets Multimedia </aside> </nav> <header> Notebook & Tablets <nav> Laptop Netbook Tablets / iPad </nav> </header> As you notice on the home page the Main Site Navigation is included in the <header>while it is not in the sub-pages. PROPOSITION B Home Page: <header> My PC Store <nav> Desktop PC's Notebook & Tablets Multimedia </nav> </header> Sub-Page (Notebook & Tablets): <header> Notebook & Tablets <nav> Desktop PC's Notebook & Tablets Multimedia </nav> # Notebook & Tablets * Laptop Netbook Tablets / iPad </header> The main navgation remains always in the <header>(home page / sub-pages) of all page. I need suggestions... How would you guys organize the nav ? </header> </header>0 -
Will A DHTML Overlay Or ThickBox Capturing Email Hurt SEO?
Some of our competitors use an overlay window on all their pages to sign a customer up for an email list (usually offering a coupon). Our questions is related to the impact on SEO the overlay might have. Does anyone have experience doing this and is this a "safe" thing to do related to SEO? Thanks...
Web Design | | onlineinitiatives0 -
Does using Wordpress Multisite have any negative SEO impact?
I manage multiple websites in Wordpress and the idea of managing them all under one Wordpress install is very attractive. Are there any dangers SEO-wise to doing so? I know that all of the sites would live under the same IP address, but that's not something I'm really concerned with anyway because I don't do a lot of inter-linking between the sites. Thanks for your help! -El Juano
Web Design | | JonathanFashbaugh0