Product Listings - is it worth indexing the whole product catalogue?
-
I'm working on a site that has around 500 product listings. This is for a rental company without any sort of ecommerce platform, so, there's no prices, no adding a product to a cart, etc. Also, there are no different sizing / color options for each product, so each product is the canonical version.
After some restructuring, we're starting to see a lot of 404s and just some general mess.
I have a couple of thoughts.
My first is to just noindex each product. We hardly get any direct traffic to an individual product page, and if they land anywhere related to products, it's usually a category page. If I noindex the products, I don't have to worry about the 404s.
My second is to implement the rel=canonical tag on each product to correspond to its primary category. While this is sort of liberal use of the canonical tag, I'm thinking that it could help drive more organic traffic to the category pages.
Does anyone have any insight or thoughts on this? Thank you very much!
-
So that's sort of my initial thought in using the rel=canonical tag for its stated purpose. But I know that Google is pretty liberal with its understanding (say in using rel=canonical for individual events in a series) of user intent.
So my example would be: if I had a gray washtub and a black washtub - two separate products because they have different dimensions, capacities, etc, I would want to point any value back to the category "washtub" where both these products are listed. Do you still think that would be frowned upon?
-
Hi Matt,
As far as I understand your problem, it doesn't seem a good way to use REL Canonical to link products to categories. As it's intended to link a page that is the same to another page which you wouldn't be doing here. What I would recommend is noindexing the page if you're confident that it doesn't provide you with any user intent.
Martijn.
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
-
Google is indexing our old domain
We changed our primary domain from vivitecsolutions.com to vivitec.net. Google is indexing our new domain, but still has our old domain indexed too. The problem is that the old site is timing out because of the https: Thought on how to make the old indexing go away or properly forward the https?
Technical SEO | | AdsposureDev0 -
Best practices for types of pages not to index
Trying to better understand best practices for when and when not use a content="noindex". Are there certain types of pages that we shouldn't want Google to index? Contact form pages, privacy policy pages, internal search pages, archive pages (using wordpress). Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | RichHamilton_qcs0 -
Homepage not indexed
Hi, I have a problem with my website. From my PC, when I search for site:nobelcom.com the homepage of the website doesn't appear, but on other PCs (different IPs) it is ok.
Technical SEO | | Silviu
Also any keywords that usually responded with homepage, now responds with other page. Does anyone know way this is happening. It happen before the Penguin update, and after a fetch like google and send to index, I had the homepage back on serps0 -
Google crawling but not indexing for no apparent reason
Client's site went secure about two months ago and chose root domain as rel canonical (so site redirects to https://rootdomain.com (no "www"). Client is seeing the site recognized and indexed by Google about every 3-5 days and then not indexed until they request a "Fetch". They've been going through this annoying process for about 3 weeks now. Not sure if it's a server issue or a domain issue. They've done work to enhance .htaccess (i.e., the redirects) and robots.txt. If you've encountered this issue and have a recommendation or have a tech site or person resource to recommend, please let me know. Google search engine results are respectable. One option would be to do nothing but then would SERPs start to fall without requesting a new Fetch? Thanks in advance, Alan
Technical SEO | | alankoen1230 -
Google Indexing of Site Map
We recently launched a new site - on June 4th we submitted our site map to google and almost instantly had all 25,000 URL's crawled (yay!). On June 18th, we made some updates to the title & description tags for the majority of pages on our site and added new content to our home page so we submitted a new sitemap. So far the results have been underwhelming and google has indexed a very low number of the updated pages. As a result, only a handful of the new titles and descriptions are showing up on the SERP pages. Any ideas as to why this might be? What are the tricks to having google re-index all of the URLs in a sitemap?
Technical SEO | | Emily_A0 -
Website is not indexed in Google
Hi Guys, I have a problem with a website from a customer. His website is not indexed in Google (except for the homepage). I could not find anything that can possibly be the cause. I already checked the robots.txt, sitemap, and plugins on the website. In the HTML code i also couldn't find anything which makes indexing harder than usual. This is the website i am talking about: http://www.xxxx.nl/ (Dutch) The only thing that i am guessing now is the Google sandbox, but even that is quite unlikely. I hope you guys discover something i could not find! Thanks in advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | B.Great0 -
Duplicate Content of Reseller Product?
There is a particular product/service that I resell through an API. There are quite a few of them and each one requires a lot of content. The company provides web content for each product but I'm wondering about the SEO implications of using it? Obviously using the content, it will not be unique so I won't be able to rank (easily at least) for these products. Are there any _negative_results that I can get from using this content though? If I simply won't rank for those products it's not an issue since I get traffic elsewhere. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | reliabox0 -
Domain restructure, sitemaps and indexing
I've got a handcoded site with around 1500 unique articles and a handcoded sitemap. Very old school. The url structure is a bit of a mess, so to make things easier for a developer who'll be making the site database-driven, I thought I'd recategorise the content. Same content, but with new url structure (I thought I'd juice up the urls for SEO purposes while I was at it) To this end, I took categories like: /body/amazing-big-shoes/
Technical SEO | | magdaknight
/style/red-boots/
/technology/cyber-boots/ And rehoused all the content like so, doing it all manually with ftp: /boots/amazing-boots/
/boots/red-boots/
/boots/cyber-boots/ I placed 301 redirects in the .htaccess file like so: redirect 301 /body/amazing-boots/ http://www.site.co.uk/boots/amazing-boots/ (not doing redirects for each article, just for categories which seemed to make the articles redirect nicely.) Then I went into sitemap.xml and manually overwrote all the entries to reflect the new url structure, but keeping the old dates of the original entries, like so: <url><loc>http://www.site.co.uk/boots/amazing-boots/index.php</loc>
<lastmod>2008-07-08</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority></url> And resubmitted the sitemap to Google Webmasters. This was done 4 days ago. Webmaster said that the 1400 of 1500 articles indexed had dropped to 860, and today it's climbed to 939. Did I adopt correct procedure? Am I going about things the right way? Given a little time, can I expect Google to re-index the new pages nicely? I appreciate I've made a lot of changes in one fell swoop which could be a bit of a no-no... ? PS Apologies if this question appears twice on Q&A - hopefully I haven't double-posted0