What is the best SEO way to categorize products on an ecommerce site
-
What is the best way for SEO to set up categories for an ecommerce site selling beauty products. I have currently built my product categories so that if a person looks under the hydration category they find our body lotion, but also if they look under the body section of products they also will find the same body lotion. Is this a problem for SEO? I think it helps the customer find the product.
-
When it comes to an E-commerce SEO, if you want to get on the first page of Bing or Google, the most important things is that you will need high-quality do-follow and no-follow back links.
Read the moz help section, to learn more about why links are important part of seo.
also when it comes to e-commerce SEO, make sure that all of the product descriptions are very well written, and white hat, so we mean by that is, don't use duplicated text, instead, write the product descriptions in a white hat way.
We worked for a business, which sells log cabins, we got that business on the first page by building quality backlinks
-
.../category-green/some-product.html
.../category-brand/some-product.html
.../category-widget/some-product.html.../some-product.html clean URL should exist and the canonical tag within the top three URLs should be pointing to this clean product URL. The 3 above can be crawled and indexed, but the canonical is assisting Google in understanding which is the correct product URL. A product can rightly exist in multiple categories.
If the platform is such that a clean product URL is not possible (urghh!), then a strategy needs to be developed to choose one of the category/product URLs as the canonical.
My preference though is to have a category structure and all product links coming from those category pages are clean product URLs in the first place, with self referencing canonicals.
-
Thank you for that answer. If I understand you correctly, as long as the category is not in the URL path, then just make sure the category is optimized and the product is in the right category. You are suggesting it should not be a problem to have the same product in two categories using this method? But if the category is in the product URL path, then it would not be good to have a product in multiple categories, right?
-
The way I prefer is to have multiple optimised categories that a product rightly sits in, but the actual product URL is clean with no category in the URL. The page canonical is then self referencing.
If that is not possible and the product URL/s contains the category path, like on Shopify for example, then it is ok to have the product URL canonical set to the clean product URL without category structure. But that only works if that clean URL actually exists (in Shopify it does).
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
-
SEO - Ecommerce Small Business Quick Wins
Hi I have a few hurdles I need some help with. I work on an ecommerce site, it's huge but I'm the only SEO. I've identified areas where we can make progress in rankings - we already have pages appearing for those terms, but they still need help to be pushed higher. My issue is - if it's a product listing page & we have all the SEO foundations here already, how can we push this even further? No one in the company wants too much content on this page taking away from products & I've tried adding a small amount - with no results. I know UX is something to be looked at, but I need support from others so this will be slow. Does anyone agree that writing user guides, hub pages & articles that this is a good next step? My only worry is - these pages will also be new and take time to rank so will they help the category pages enough? How can I maximise them? I'm also the only SEO, so really need to pick my battles. Thanks Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Best SEO Strategist to hire for 4-5K
Hello, We want to get a top notch company to look at us for 4-5K. We don't need SEO, we've got plenty of motion through the press and word of mouth, but if an all around agency was to give good advice I could get him some time with our CEO. How do I get the best for only 4-5K, we may continue with services or it may just be a one time thing. Who should I contact? Bob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Best SEO url woocommerce, what to do?
Hi! Today we have our product categories indexed (by misstake) and for one of our desired keywords, a category have the nr 1 rank. By misstake, we didnt set nofollow, noindex on our categories, just tags, archives etc. We are now migrating to from Ithemes Exchange to Woocommerce and ime looking on improving our SEO urls for the categories. For keyword "Key1" we rank with this url: http://site/product-category/Key1. The seo meta title and description where untouched when we launched the site last spring so it doesnt look so good.. The plan is to stripe out product-category and instead ad some description ( i have a newly written text of 95 words, 519 letters without space with they keyword precent 5 times in a natural way ) to that particular category and have the url as following: http://site/key1 and then have a 301 redirect for the old http://site/product-category/Key1. What do you think of this? What shall i consider? on the right track? Grateful for any help! // Jonas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knubbz0 -
Ipad Sales & Traffic Improvement for my Ecommerce site
Do you guys know any tool or software which provides follow things for my ecommerce site? Real Time/ next day data for ipad traffic Real Time/ next day data for ipad urls visited Read time/ next day data for ipad Page rendering load time for all the urls separately Real Time/ next day data for ipad network load time for all the urls separately Real Time/ next day data for ipad dom processing time for the all the urls separately Real Time/ next day data for ipad request queuing load time for all the urls separtely Real Time/ next day data for ipad web application load time for all the urls separtely Real Time/ next day data for ipad total load time for each url Real Time/ Next day data for ipad timestamp i.e Time of each url being accessed by the visitor Real Time/ next day data for ipad visitor city Real Time/ next day data for ipad visitor country code Real Time/ next day data for ipad visitor duration on that page Real Time/ next day data for ipad visitor user agent name foreg chrome, IE, safari, firefox etc Real time/ next day data for ipad visitor user agent OS foreg. ipad only Real time/ next day data for ipad user agent version foreg. ipad 8.0, ipad 6.0, ipad air, ipad ratina, ipad mini etc Real time/ next day data for ipad visitor for each url session trace in water fall like backend time, dom processing, page load, waiting on ajax, interactions of visitors etc Real time/ next day data for ipad visitor for each url with total request for each page. Real time/ next day data for ipad visitors for each url with javascript error on the page and javascript url plus stake track of that error. Real time/ next day data for ipad visitors for each url with ajax error on the page and ajax url plus stake track of the error Real time/ next day data for ipad visitors for each and every url where each and every request time taken in waterfall layout. Real time/ next day data for ipad visitors funnel visiualization tracking Real time/ next day data for ipad visitors transcations tracking. Please note that all above data also require day wise, country wise, previous days and month, model wise sorting, pagination feature, etc. waiting for your reply Regards, Mit
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mit0 -
SEO question regarding rails app on www.site.com hosted on Heroku and www.site.com/blog at another host
Hi, I have a rails app hosted on Heroku (www.site.com) and would much prefer to set up a Wordpress blog using a different host pointing to www.site.com/blog, as opposed to using a gem within the actual app. Whats are peoples thoughts regarding there being any ranking implications for implementing the set up as noted in this post on Stackoverflow: "What I would do is serve your Wordpress blog along side your Rails app (so you've got a PHP and a Rails server running), and just have your /blog route point to a controller that redirects to your Wordpress app. Add something like this to your routes.rb: _`get '/blog', to:'blog#redirect'`_ and then have a redirect method in your BlogController that simply does this: _`classBlogController<applicationcontrollerdef redirect="" redirect_to="" "url_of_wordpress_blog"endend<="" code=""></applicationcontrollerdef>`_ _Now you can point at yourdomain.com/blog and it will take you to the Wordpress site._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Anward0 -
Best way to target multiple geographic locations
Hello Mozzers! If you are a service provider wanting to target geographic locations outside of the region where you're physically located, what's the best approach? For example, I have a service provider whose main market is not where they're located - they're based in Devon UK, yet main markets are London, Birmingham, Newcastle, Edinburgh. They have clients in all these cities, so I could definitely provide content relevant to each city - perhaps a page for each city detailing work and services (and possibly listing clients). However, does the lack of a physical presence (and local phone number) in these cities make such city pages virtually impossible to rank these days? Does Google require a physical presence/phone number? Thanks in advance, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
SEO and former site
Hi, my client had a site built and hosted with Avvo but we now shut it down and are using a new server. My concern is that Avvo's internal link structure is causing SEO issues. For example, his site will list for "San Diego Criminal Defense Attorney", but is then removed for no reason. Far worse, while he had the AVVO site, it would never rank at all on Google. He's got great content, and no spammy links. This is the site: www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com. Any thoughts of what I could do to disavow the AVVO pages that Google still has indexed? Does it matter? Or, is it simply a function of time? Thank you for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Best place to submit an SEO RFP? Anyone interested in 60 hours of SEO work?
I have a small SEO project (~ 60 hours of work) that I would like to get some help with. It is spread out over the span of 4 to 6 months (2 to 3 hours of work a week with the help of 10 - 15 support staff hours per week), and if it goes well there is an opportunity to extend the project through the rest of 2014. Does anyone here want to see the RFP or have any recommendations on where I can submit this request to get the maximum exposure? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt0