Is it possible we are being penalized for doorway pages?
-
www.trophycentral.comHi, we were hit very hard a few years ago by Panda and have been try to recover. We completely revamped our site (structure, canonical, duplicates, content, etc.) and had a couple of keywords recover. However, most traffic has not comeback and still cannot be found in the top 30 pages or so for major phrases. We have compared ourselves to major competitors in our industry and see very few differences. The only thing I see as a difference is that many of our products are in multiple sections. For example, we have all baseball awards (trophies, pins, medals) grouped together. We then have just baseball medals together and just baseball pins together. Is this something that could be causing us not to rank? I am asking because the phrases that are ranking are the ones that don't have multiple categories. We have no manual penalties, but now I am thinking this is what Google might consider a doorway page?As an experiment, I just noindexed all but one category for baseball and soccer to see what happens.Does this make sense? Has anyone else seen this?Thanks!
-
Hi Neil,
What I mean by category URLs is that a product sits on a URL like http://www.trophycentral.com/5x7blacmarpl.html, rather than http://www.trophycentral.com/plaques/insertplaques/5x7blacmarpl.html but as I said, the flat structure you are using can work as well. Putting products in structures like that can get confusing if products exist in multiple categories and make way for duplicate content (i.e. a product is found under multiple different URLs). Just worth mentioning though because it's not common to see such a flat structure nowadays with the ecommerce platforms a lot of folks are using, like Magento, etc.
I wouldn't worry too much about tabs. If the content behind tabs is a) not incredibly long, b) relevant to the page, and c) available in the source code on page load (i.e. it doesn't require the execution of a JavaScript function to pull the content into the tab / onto the page), Google can see this content and should treat it much the same as if the content wasn't tabbed.
Cheers,
Jane
-
Hi Jane, thanks for your response.
Yes, the sections that are ranking better do not have as many products listed in other sections. That is why I originally thought we might be getting dinged. But have products in multiple categories is very common, so it is likely a coincidence. I have made some changes to experiment, so I guess I will find out soon enough.
I also realized that I may be getting hurt by the tabs on our item pages. While our descriptions are getting indexed, because they are tabbed I am told they may be carrying a much lower value. So I am changing this as well.
Can you elaborate on what you mean be the structure without category URLs? The vast majority of products should be in a category (trophies, plaques, etc.). I guess we do have some that are not which I could remove or put in a category, but I want to be sure I know which ones you might be looking at.
Thanks again! … Neil
-
Hi there,
The duplication of the products is not highly likely to be causing an issue here given that many ecommerce sites operate like this, but duplicate content was one of the primary issues Panda sought to weed out. It seems as if Panda can be very hard to get rid of, even if you have cleaned up 99% of the issue: you're doing the same or better than similar sites that are not under a penalty but the penalty remains because a certain amount of duplication (or another issue) remains.
Is the problem uniform - i.e. all products that rank well are not duplicated, and all products that have ranking problems are duplicated?
The structure without category URLs is a little abnormal too but what amounts to a flat website shouldn't hold you back completely either.
-
I am interested as well to see what others think. I agree with the categories and dup content issues that could occur.
Please keep us all posted
-
Thanks, Lesley. What you are saying makes perfect sense and putting products in categories seems pretty pervasive. I don't really think this was the issue, but I am running out of things to change. (-: I am definitely suffering from a Panda penalty, but still not sure why as I have cleaned up all of the common issues. I have a couple of phrases that came back to page 2 or 3 (not where I want, but it's a start), such as Award Ribbons and Award Plaques. So I tried to compare those pages to my other ones and this is what I came up with (these products are not in multiple categories). Again, like you I don't think this is the issue, but I figured I would test it as maybe Google is somehow getting confused with how the categories are created.
Again, many thanks.
PS If you happen to see anything else that looks funny, please let me know! We have been in business since 1999, so it is hard to have virtually no traffic from Google!
-
I would not think so. If you are using a logical division of products using categories and sub categories, I cannot see that holding you back. It is really the defacto standard on how e-commerce sites work. As long as your site is not doing something weird with the re-writes on the the products I think you would be fine. A weird rewrite would be like this, say you are selling a baseball pin. If your rewrites do this site.com/baseball-things/pin.html and the page is also at site.com/baseball-things/pins/pin.html then I would highly suggest using canonical urls. Because one of the pages is going to get a duplicate content penalty.
Another thing I would suggest is if you are not already, use category descriptions for the category pages and also mix the products. You don't want your main category to have 75% of the products that a sub category has. Like in the example above, if 3/4 of the products in the baseball root category are pins, I would change that to be a more even number between the categories.
Also one other suggestion, I wouldn't use empty categories either. Like for basketball, if all you offer is trophies, I would not have a basketball category then a basketball trophies category. That would be seen as duplicate content.
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 does Googlebot evaluate performance/page speed on Isomorphic/Single Page Applications?
I'm curious how Google evaluates pagespeed for SPAs. Initial payloads are inherently large (resulting in 5+ second load times), but subsequent requests are lightning fast, as these requests are handled by JS fetching data from the backend. Does Google evaluate pages on a URL-by-URL basis, looking at the initial payload (and "slow"-ish load time) for each? Or do they load the initial JS+HTML and then continue to crawl from there? Another way of putting it: is Googlebot essentially "refreshing" for each page and therefore associating each URL with a higher load time? Or will pages that are crawled after the initial payload benefit from the speedier load time? Any insight (or speculation) would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mothner1 -
How to optimize count of interlinking by increasing Interlinking count of chosen landing pages and decreasing for less important pages within the site?
We have taken out our interlinking counts (Only Internal Links and not Outbound Links) through Google WebMaster tool and discovered that the count of interlinking of our most significant pages are less as compared to of less significant pages. Our objective is to reverse the existing behavior by increasing Interlinking count of important pages and reduce the count for less important pages so that maximum link juice could be transferred to right pages thereby increasing SEO traffic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Why has my home page replaced my sub-category page for set of keywords? Happened 2x in last 2 weeks for day or so only to fix itself. What is going on?
Today I noticed a really weird problem. Our LED Step Lights page (https://www.pegasuslighting.com/led-step-lights.html) has been replaced in the search results with our home page. See screenshot below. As I started to research what was going on, I noticed that this same thing must have happened on January 26 and 27 because in my Analytics I can see that our LED Step Lights sub-cat page had a sudden drop in traffic on those two days only to bounce back again on the 28th. See screenshot below. Our LED Step Lights page has had no changes in content, meta information, or anything in months. We have done no recent link building to this page in years. I don't understand what is going on. This is a popular page for us generating decent traffic. I really don't understand what is going on or even how to try and resolve this problem. I checked our Search Console. No messages. No manual web spam actions. Nothing to suggest that anything is going on except for the weird drops in traffic. Has anyone ever seen this happen before? Does anyone have any ideas as to what may be going on? serp-led-step-lights.png organic-traffic-drops.png search-console-led-step-lights.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cajohnson0 -
Duplicate content on product pages
Hi, We are considering the impact when you want to deliver content directly on the product pages. If the products were manufactured in a specific way and its the same process across 100 other products you might want to tell your readers about it. If you were to believe the product page was the best place to deliver this information for your readers then you could potentially be creating mass content duplication. Especially as the storytelling of the product could equate to 60% of the page content this could really flag as duplication. Our options would appear to be:1. Instead add the content as a link on each product page to one centralised URL and risk taking users away from the product page (not going to help with conversion rate or designers plans)2. Put the content behind some javascript which requires interaction hopefully deterring the search engine from crawling the content (doesn't fit the designers plans & users have to interact which is a big ask)3. Assign one product as a canonical and risk the other products not appearing in search for relevant searches4. Leave the copy as crawlable and risk being marked down or de-indexed for duplicated contentIts seems the search engines do not offer a way for us to serve this great content to our readers with out being at risk of going against guidelines or the search engines not being able to crawl it.How would you suggest a site should go about this for optimal results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux2 -
Our client's web property recently switched over to secure pages (https) however there non secure pages (http) are still being indexed in Google. Should we request in GWMT to have the non secure pages deindexed?
Our client recently switched over to https via new SSL. They have also implemented rel canonicals for most of their internal webpages (that point to the https). However many of their non secure webpages are still being indexed by Google. We have access to their GWMT for both the secure and non secure pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB
Should we just let Google figure out what to do with the non secure pages? We would like to setup 301 redirects from the old non secure pages to the new secure pages, but were not sure if this is going to happen. We thought about requesting in GWMT for Google to remove the non secure pages. However we felt this was pretty drastic. Any recommendations would be much appreciated.0 -
Should my back links go to home page or internal pages
Right now we rank on page 2 for many KWs, so should i now focus my attention on getting links to my home page to build domain authority or continue to direct links to the internal pages for specific KWs? I am about to write some articles for several good ranking sites and want to know whether to link my company name (same as domain name) or KW to the home page or use individual KWs to the internal pages - I am only allowed one link per article to my site. Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
Has my site been penalized?
Our site was listed on the first page for the phrase Active SEO on Google.co.uk. We suddenly find ourselves on page 4 overnight and we're not sure what's going on. We have not undertaken an Black hat techniques however the site is fairly new. Anyone have any ideas as to what is going on?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MassivePrime0 -
How long for new pages to rank
Hi Guys, Our website has some really good serps for our established keyword phrases some of which are quite competitive. We recently acquired and have begun selling some new brands through our online shop and launched new pages for these brands around 2 months ago. They are quite competitive ("merrell shoes" and "timberland boots" for example in google.co.uk) terms. Do you think we should get some keyword rich links built into these new pages from external sites such as blogs - or is there chances of ranking well driven more off our overall site authority/link profile? In other peoples experience, what is a typical realistic timeframe to start getting meaningful serps on new pages/keyword phrases (I know that is hard to answer - but ball parks figures appreciated). Thank you everyone in advance. Kind Regards (and happy thanksgiving to our US friends)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ConradC
Conrad Cranfield0