Removing unnecessary categories in Ecommerce
-
We're working on a website built in WooCommerce that has 12 products.
Each of the products have URLs like this www.website.com/products/product-name.
We're thinking about removing the /products/ so that they keyword is as close to the left as possible, but came across this page from WooCommerce saying that it could be a bad thing:
http://docs.woothemes.com/document/removing-product-product-category-or-shop-from-the-urls/
Your thoughts? Thanks for the help!
-
Remove the products.. it adds no value. What the article is describing is if you have collisions. Like say you have a "page" in wordpress call "ipod" and you also have a product called "ipod" When you remove the category, everything will be like yoursite.com/ipod so if you have a product named the exact name as a page you will have a collision. Just ensure that you do not have this. SEO ultimate plugin can do this, I use it on my blog for the very same thing with no problems. Or you can manually do the rewrites in the htaccess file.
You absolute best bet since you are not dealing with a lot of products, it sounds like it is a small site, is do it in the middle of the night and do a spider from MOZ and see if it picks up errors.
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
-
Why a certain URL ( a category URL ) disappears?
the page hasn't been spammed. - links are natural - onpage grader is perfect - there are useful high ranking articles linking to the page...pretty much everything is okay.....also all of my websites pages are okay and none of them has disappeared only this one ( the most important category of my site. )
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mohamadalieskandariii0 -
How to optimize an ecommerce catalog that uses parameters only
Hello ! I am facing a problem concerning a client's website that has been developped using filters that create parameters - there are no categories. This means that, no matter what I choose as a filter, the page title, desc and my H1 stays the same. In a beautiful, unicorn rainbow filled world - I could just tell them to restructure their site with new categories/sub categories AND with filters. For SEO purposes and to find a temporary solution until we can change the architecture, what would be the best choice? Should we create individual pages that serves the same content as the catalog, but with rewritten URL, Title, Description and canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charles-O
ie: http:/domain.com/catalog/?brand=moz canonical to http:/domain.com/catalog/brand/moz ? I noticed indeed.com does that (https://ca.indeed.com/SEO-Specialist-jobs vs https://ca.indeed.com/jobs?q=SEO+Specialist&l=) Should we dynamise the content depending on which filters has been selected? Of course, some filters are real filters that wouldn't attract or add any value (such as order by) Thanks for your input!0 -
Cross Linking two related ecommerce websites
Hi Guys, Hope you'll be able to help me with a technical problem I am facing right now. We are a company right ? We own 2 webistes. Let's say one sells car parts, the other one buys second hand car parts to refurbish them and sell them. (It is not our case, just an example very similar to ours). sellparts.com buyparts.com Both are ecommerce websites, with large catalogues (7000 skus). sellparts sells a lot and is a big actor in its market. buyparts.com doesn't work nad has a really low DA. My new SEO external consultant, which I am not too convinced about, is telling me to cross link the sites on product level using cross-linking extensions. He want have them do-follow. That would mean having hundreds or thousands of links with really similar linking patterns. buy [parts] [model ] [make] sell [parts] [model ] [make] That to me seems a bit too much and I am worried it compromises the sellparts site's SEO. So should i no-follow the links ? Or do it differently ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kepass0 -
Should I 301 this ecommerce site, or turn it into a blog?
Hey everyone, I have a couple of ecommerce sites - Site 1 (DA33) and Site 2 (DA24). They are in the same niche and have the same products, a relic of how our business started in 2007. But now we just want to manage one brand, Site 1. This is our question: Is it better to 301 Site 2 into Site 1 (page by page redirect), or would it be valuable to instead turn Site 2 into a blog site? Site 2 currently has some good relevant links to it that would be nice to 301 to Site 1, but the value of 301 redirects seems to have been steadily diminishing since roughly 2011. If we take Site 2 and turn it into a WordPress blog, develop some good industry-relevant content on it (and outsource/allow guest posts on it for relevant quality content as well), and sometimes we drop a link or two into the content to help promote Site 1 - would that be more valuable than a 301? Obviously, a lot more "work" goes into creating a content site than just 301'ing it over. I guess the question is: does a page-by-page 301 of a niche-identical and even product-identical site into another have more of a benefit for SEO than getting some content-relevant anchor text links on a blog site? What would you do in my position?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mozUser14692350692210 -
Is it a good idea to remove old blogs?
So I have a site right now that isn't ranking well, and we are trying everything to help it out. One of my areas of concern is we have A LOT of old blogs that were not well written and honestly are not overly relevant. None of them rank for anything, and could be causing a lot of duplicate content issues. Our newer blogs are doing better and written in a more Q&A type format and it seems to be doing better. So my thought is basically wipe out all the blogs from 2010-2012 -- probably 450+ blog posts. What do you guys think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper1 -
The Affects of Removing Anchor Texts from Super Menu on Homepage
Hi, Currently we have a div that drops down our super menu which has subcategories, ie. under Shop by Color (super menu) Black Ties, Blue Ties, Brown Ties, et, al. (see Ties.com Anchor Text image attached) If we were to remove these subcategories from the div (in other words, they do not get crawled from homepage, will we loose ranking for those keywords? We are trying to reduce link count on homepage. Thoughts? UBHu8.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ties.com0 -
Removing Canonical Links
We implemented rel=canonical as we decided to paginate our pages. We then ran some testing and on the whole pagination did not work out so we removed all on-page pagination. Now, internally when I click for example a link for Widgets I get the /widgets.php but searching through Google I get to /widgets.php?page=all . There are not redirects in place at the moment. The '?page=all' page has been rated 'A' by the SEOmoz tool under On Page Optimization reports and performs much better than the exact same page without the '?page=all' (the score dips to a 'D' grade) so need to tread carefully so we don't lose the link value. Can anyone advise us on the best way forward? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jannkuzel0 -
Removing pages from index
Hello, I run an e-commerce website. I just realized that Google has "pagination" pages in the index which should not be there. In fact, I have no idea how they got there. For example, www.mydomain.com/category-name.asp?page=3434532
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexGop
There are hundreds of these pages in the index. There are no links to these pages on the website, so I am assuming someone is trying to ruin my rankings by linking to the pages that do not exist. The page content displays category information with no products. I realize that its a flaw in design, and I am working on fixing it (301 none existent pages). Meanwhile, I am not sure if I should request removal of these pages. If so, what is the best way to request bulk removal. Also, should I 301, 404 or 410 these pages? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, Alex0