Will Using Attributes For Landing Pages In Magento Dilute Page Rank?
-
Hello Mozzers!
We have an ecommerce site built on Magento. We would like to use attribute filters in our layered navigation for landing page purposes. Each page will have a unique URL, Meta Title and Meta Description. For example:
URL: domain.com/art/abstract (category is Art, attribute is Abstract)
Title: Abstract Art For Sale
Meta: Blah Blah Blah
Currently these attribute pages are not being indexed by google as they are set in google parameters.
We would like to edit google parameters to start indexing some of the attribute filters that users search for, so they can be used as landing pages.
Does anyone have experience with this? Is this a good idea? What are the consequences? Will this dilute Page Rank? Could this destroy the world?
Cheers!
MozAddict
-
Thanks for the heads up on robots.txt. I also think the attribute landing pages will not provide the same user experience as the layered navigation pages. I appreciate you sharing your thoughts on the matter.
Cheers!
-
I think it is possible to add 1000s of pages of unique content over time.
Excluding (I assume that's what you mean) the layered nav pages in robots.txt won't necessarily keep Google from indexing those pages, only crawling them. So you end up with something like this in the SERP - http://screencast.com/t/SPKDV09SM9 (Note the meta description.)
If you didn't want them in the SERP you'd need to add a meta noindex to the of the page as well.
I don't really like splash/doorway/gateway pages like those from a usability perspective. If I'm going to drive traffic to a page on my client's e-commerce site, I want that page to have active product on it. I realize you can do some Magento hoodoo and get product on static pages but it's not worth the effort in my opinion. You're better off focusing on conversions from your layered nav pages with unique content.
-
Thank you for your fantastic input!
I think your point on adding unique content to pages is great advise. This is something we aim to do, although it will not be possible on all the pages that will be generated, since the combinations will probably be in the thousands.
We are currently using rel prev next and rel canonical on the filtered pages for the purpose of using them as landing pages
Another potential route could be to robot.txt the layered navigation and create attribute splash pages as landing pages for important keywords. These pages would be manually created and contain custom meta titles/descriptions and on page content. These pages are not a part of the main catalogue search page, instead are separate pages. For example the URL for such a page would be domain.com/abstract-art instead of domain.com/art/abstract
What are your thoughts on this route? Which option is better in your opinion?
-
Hello! Great question; I've worked with Magento quite a bit and layered navigation can definitely be a bit tricky from an SEO perspective.
The most important thing to opening up some or all of these pages to Google for consideration, is having unique content on the page. This is not something Magento themes typically include by default but will be 100% necessary to get most if not all of these pages to rank well.
Most typically we add a static block to the top or bottom of the page to add uniqueness. Without it, all of the content on these types of pages are almost always 100% non-unique and from my experience Google ignores.
If your layered nav pages also use pagination, you'll need to make sure you follow best practices for using canonical and/or rel prev/next/view all to make sure Google isn't looking at your paginated pages as extra duplicated content.
And as a final reply, I think it can be a great idea with limited consequences as long as you follow the above advice regarding unique content and pagination. Additionally there's no worry regarding Pagerank or destroying the world.
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
-
How can I avoid duplicate content for a new landing page which is the same as an old one?
Hello mozers! I have a question about duplicate content for you... One on my clients pages have been dropping in search volume for a while now, and I've discovered it's because the search term isn't as popular as it used to be. So... we need to create a new landing page using a more popular search term. The page which is losing traffic is based on the search query "Can I put a solid roof on my conservatory" this only gets 0-10 searches per month according to the keyword explorer tool. However, if we changed this to "replacing conservatory roof with solid roof" this gets up to 500 searches per month. Muuuuch better! The issue is, I don't want to close down and re-direct the old page because it's got a featured snippet and sits in position 1. So I'd like to create another page instead... however, as the two are effectively the same content, I would then land myself in a duplicate content issue. If I were to put a rel="canonical" tag in the original "can I put a solid roof...." page but say the master page is now the new one, would that get around the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz0 -
Why is my landing page title tag being applied to the entire site?
I have a unique title tag for every page on my site but depending on what page a user lands on, that title becomes the title tag for the entire site. For example, if you come in from SERPs via the "Zach King: My Magical Life" page, the title "Zach King: My Magical Life" title will be applied to every page on the site even though they have unique title tags. This is the site: https://www.shelfstuff.com/book-shelf. Any ideas on how to fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | craigkleila470 -
Links / Top Pages by Page Authority ==> pages shouldnt be there
I checked my site links and top pages by page authority. What i have found i dont understand, because the first 5-10 pages did not exist!! Should know that we launched a new site and rebuilt the static pages so there are a lot of new pages, and of course we deleted some old ones. I refreshed the sitemap.xml (these pages are not in there) and upload it in GWT. Why those old pages appear under the links menu at top pages by page authority?? How can i get rid off them? thx, Endre
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Neckermann0 -
Is there any effect on ranking if i disable right click on page??
Hello , I have site, in which client needs right click on All his pages, his traffic is very Good, But worried, if right click hurts its traffic, ?? any expert can help ?? Thx in Advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ieplnupur0 -
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 -
How do i migrate from Volusion to Magento with the same domain using 301 redirect?
We are thinking about migrating our site from Volusion to Magento due to traffic reasons, our site's been growing and we're going way over the bandwidth limit (40gb) for Volusion every month. It only make sense for us to start on Magento CE where we can host it on our site and use our own bandwidth. We will be using the same domain, and changing our URLs to make things better (we were somewhat restricted by Volusion so we couldn't optimize some of our URL addresses). Here's comes the main question, since we are ranking pretty good for the keywords that we're targeting, we ABSOLUTELY DON'T want to lose any traffic or ranking from our pages, I know that there's something called the 301 redirect that we can use, but how can this be done? When we migrate the site, we will need to point our domain to Magento from Volusion, so basically Volusion store will be down... if we are changing domain names then the 301 redirect makes sense because we can have the original store live while it's redirecting to a completely new address. Is there any method to still setup this 301 redirect, or is there something else I can do to save our rankings??? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s2bkevin0 -
Ranking slipped to page 6 from page 1 over the weekend?
My site has been on page one for 2 phrases consistently from May onwards this year. The site has fewer than 100 backlinks and the link profile looks fairly even. On Friday we were on page 1, we even had a position 1, however now we are on page 6. Do you think this is Penguin or some strange Google blip? We have no webmaster tools messages at all. Thanks for any help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinechester0 -
301 a strong but under-performing landing page to a new domain?
Hi guys, Our website have a very strong landing page (PA 80, more than 1,000 domains linking) but is currently not ranking at all as the targeted terms are dominated by exact match domains. We are thinking of redirecting this particular page to a new partial match domain targeting the same keywords. Is it a good move?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sssrpm0