Which is better? One dynamically optimised page, or lots of optimised pages?
-
For the purpose of simplicity, we have 5 main categories in the site - let's call them A, B, C, D, E.
Each of these categories have sub-category pages e.g. A1, A2, A3.
The main area of the site consists of these category and sub-category pages.
But as each product comes in different woods, it's useful for customers to see all the product that come in a particular wood, e.g. walnut. So many years ago we created 'woods' pages. These pages replicate the categories & sub-categories but only show what is available in that particular wood. And of course - they're optimised much better for that wood.
All well and good, until recently, these specialist page seem to have dropped through the floor in Google. Could be temporary, I don't know, and it's only a fortnight - but I'm worried.
Now, because the site is dynamic, we could do things differently.
We could still have landing pages for each wood, but of spinning off to their own optimised specific wood sub-category page, they could instead link to the primary sub-category page with a ?search filter in the URL. This way, the customer is still getting to see what they want.
Which is better?
One page per sub-category? Dynamically filtered by search.
Or lots of specific sub-category pages?
I guess at the heart of this question is? Does having lots of specific sub-category pages lead to a large overlap of duplicate content, and is it better keeping that authority juice on a single page? Even if the URL changes (with a query in the URL) to enable whatever filtering we need to do.
-
Hi Jonathan, Thanks for your question!
The answer depends on:
- The demand: With the search behavior of your users: Do they search for your product using the type of wood in their queries? For example: "Product + Wood Type"? If your users use those terms and queries to search for your products then it would compensate to enable them specifically to be indexable instead of using just a filter that could be non-indexable in many ways (to avoid the crawling of pages that are not meant to be ranked anyway and control your crawl budget).
- The supply: The availability of products and content that you have to match those queries: Do you have enough unique products to feature for each type of wood (or whatever criteria or subcategory) that you have identified that your users search for? Would it be considered a "low quality content" page with little value and offer by the users? With no unique description? Would they end-up penalized by Panda if you decide to index them?
If you identify that there's a demand for those specific type of products that would compensate that you specifically enable these pages to be indexable and rank for them and at the same time you have enough supply, with products and descriptive content to feature in them and satisfy your users, then yes, the best would be to create a static structure for these sub-types or sub-categories, instead of just non-indexable filters. If it's not the case, then the best would be to allow your products to be browsed using them, but without indexing these pages specifically.
Would this answer your question? If you can give me more specific examples of the category levels or more specific scenario (without giving specific brand or company names if you don't want or can't) I would be able to give you a more specific answer.
Thanks!
-
Thank you for your answer. I'm more looking for what the latest view is on best SEO architecture...
To concentrate it all onto a single dominant page (which has dynamically controlled content via search)...
or spread it widely on lots of specifically optimised pages - with the concern that the SEO 'love' may be spread too thinly. -
Hi Jonathan,
I am also in the Woodbusiness and my set-up is as follows:
Firstly I focus on the main category pages: www.company.com/categoryA etc..
Than I made for every wood specie pages aswell: company.com/woodA etc.. This generates good traffic from people who are looking for specific products in a specific type of wood
Now I am mainly focussing on product pages for my experience is that how more specific the traffic is the better the conversion rates become:
company.com/category1/woodA-productA-size
My product names all begin with the sort of wood than the product (door, table, etc...) and last the exact measurements.
This works better for me than the subcategories.
Hope it helps. Good luck!
Tymen
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
-
Understanding why our new page doesn't rank. Internal link structure to blame? + understand canonical pages more.
Hi guys. Sorry it's an essay...BUT, i think a lot of you will find this an interesting question. This question is in 2 (related) parts, and I imagine it would be an 'advanced' SEO question. Hoping you guys can help bring some real insight 🙂 Always amazed at the quality for this forum/ community. **Context... ** We had a duplicate content issue caused by this page and it's product permutations, so we placed canonical tags on all the product permutations to solve it. Worked a treat. However, we now have more **product ranges. **We now sell Diaries, Notebooks & Music books, which are clearly different from one another. So...we've placed canonical tags on all the product permutations leading back to the 'parent' theme. In other words, all the diary permutations 'lead back' to the diary page. All the notebooks permutations 'lead back' to the main notebook page. So on and so forth. Make sense so far? Context end..... Issue. Amazingly our Diary page outranks our notebook pagefor the search term 'Design your own Notebook'. The notebook page is well optimised for this search term, and the diary page avoids the word 'notebook' altogether (so no keyword cannibalisation going on). Possible reason? Our Diary page has a vast amount of internal links to it throughout our site. The notebook page has only a few. Could this be the issue? If so, what reading/ blogs/ content/ tools would you recommend to help understand and solve this problem? i.e) Better understanding internal link structure for SEO. 2nd part of the question (in the context of internal linking for SEO). When there are internal links to a page with a conical tag does that 'count' towards the 'parent page', or simply towards that specific page? I really hope that makes sense. If it's clear as mud just shout. Isaac. EDIT: All pages in question have been indexed since we added these changes to the site.
On-Page Optimization | | isaac6630 -
Webs Pages not correct
First of all I am a beginner but that will show with this question. I have moved my website from Wix to Web.com. I had the dns I think that is correct re-direct my site to web.com. Since then some of the pages from wix still show up even though they are no long apart of my site. Secondly when I go to google and type in cestoday.com some of the pages gives me a 401 or 404 error code, and others do not link to the proper page on my website. They go to my web-site but not the correct page. What do I do. Thank you Dave
On-Page Optimization | | redsman944
cesyes@hotmail.com In reference to my last question about moz not being able to see my pages and giving me an "F" I thought you might find it interesting to know that that same page once moved got an A amazing.0 -
View all Page for Product Overview Pages
Hi everybody! We have an ecommerce site with product overview pages, where sometimes there are hundreds of products listed. Usually, we just display 30 and have a button where users can click to see 30 more - or all products listed at once. This is the overview page (as indexed in google): http://www.geschenkidee.ch/aussergewoehnliches.html
On-Page Optimization | | zeepartner
And this is the view-all page: http://www.geschenkidee.ch/aussergewoehnliches.html#all What should I do here? The product overview page will hardly generate more traffic by listing all products (because the overview page will rank for generic keywords, while the product keyword searches will be referred to the specific product pages themselves). I was originally thinking of using rel=canonical pointing to the view-all page. But this would just lead to longer load time. Should we just leave those overview pages or is there a best practice for how to deal with such pages? Thanks for your thoughts on this!0 -
2 Duplicate pages. One Showing "/"
In SEOMoz report I have 2 pages showing that are identical in name/URL apart from the fact that one ends with the / symbol and one doesnt'. They are both showing as having too many on-page links. But one shows 106 links and the other shows 106. In clients' admin section I can only find evidence of the page without the /. I wonder if anyone could advise how best to move forward? Colin
On-Page Optimization | | NileCruises0 -
Duplicated Page Content
I have encountered this weird problem about duplicate page content. My site got 3 duplicate content similar on the link structure below. If I'm going to use rel canonical does it help to resolve the duplication problem? Thanks http://www.sample.com http://www.sample.com/ http://www.sample.com/index.php
On-Page Optimization | | mattvectorbpo0 -
Authority of a page
What factors contribute towards the authority of a page ? No. of links to a page ?
On-Page Optimization | | seoug_20050 -
Too many on page links
I'm having trouble interpreting this data. It says several of my blog pages have too many on page links, some as high as 140 and there is no example of a blog post that they are referring to. What am I missing? I never post more than a handful (5-7) in our 600-1000wd blogs. When I drill down, it doesn't give me very much information except "Found over 41 years ago" off to the right. When I click on the "too many on page links" URL, it provides a long list of website pages that are renamed with the blog name. huh? A lot of this stuff isn't very intuitive, SEOMoz.
On-Page Optimization | | amandahx20 -
Spammy keywords on a page
My client's website has a box of text on each page that is spammy and horrible to read and stuffed with keywords. The text boxes are there only for search engines as they mean nothing to humans. I say remove them as it must be doing more harm than good. However, my client is scared to remove them as the text has been there on each page for ten years and he is worried about a drop in visitor numbers if they are removed. Is he right to be worried?
On-Page Optimization | | mascotmike0