[Advice] Dealing with an immense URl structure full of canonicals with Budget & Time constraint

[Charles-O]

Good day to you Mozers,

I have a website that sells a certain product online and, once bought, is specifically delivered to a point of sale where the client's car gets serviced.

This website has a shop, products and informational pages that are duplicated by the number of physical PoS. The organizational decision was that every PoS were supposed to have their own little site that could be managed and modified.

Examples are:

• Every PoS could have a different price on their product
• Some of them have services available and some may have fewer, but the content on these service page doesn't change.

I get over a million URls that are, supposedly, all treated with canonical tags to their respective main page. The reason I use "supposedly" is because verifying the logic they used behind canonicals is proving to be a headache, but I know and I've seen a lot of these pages using the tag.

i.e:

• https:mysite.com/shop/ <-- https:mysite.com/pointofsale-b/shop
• https:mysite.com/shop/productA <-- https:mysite.com/pointofsale-b/shop/productA

The problem is that I have over a million URl that are crawled, when really I may have less than a tenth of them that have organic trafic potential.

Question is:
For products, I know I should tell them to put the URl as close to the root as possible and dynamically change the price according to the PoS the end-user chooses. Or even redirect all shops to the main one and only use that one.

I need a short term solution to test/show if it is worth investing in development and correct all these useless duplicate pages. Should I use Robots.txt and block off parts of the site I do not want Google to waste his time on?

I am worried about: Indexation, Accessibility and crawl budget being wasted.

Thank you in advance,

[Charles-O]

Hey Chris!

Thanks a lot for your time. I did send you a PM the day after your original post, I will send you another :).

Thanks a lot for your additionnal advice. You're right about managing client's expectations and its crucial. You're pointing out some valid points and I will have to ponder about how I approach this whole situation.

Charles,

[ChrisAshton]

Hey Charles,

No problem, I've been out of the office most of the past week so I'm trying to catch up on a few of these now, sorry! I don't recall seeing any PMs either.

I feel weird to recommend shaving 3/4 of their site on which they put a lot of money in.

That's perfectly normal and I'd have the same reservations. If you do decide to go ahead with it though (and I'm absolutely not looking to push you into a decision either way, just providing the info) you can highlight the fact that paying a lot of money for a website doesn't make it inherently good. If those extra pages are providing no unique value then they're just a hindrance to their long-term goal of earning a return from that site via organic traffic.

It's a conversation we have semi-regularly with new clients. They think that because they just spent $20k on a new site, making changes to it is silly and a waste of the money they invested in the first place. "Sure it's broken but it was expensive"... I don't think search engines or users really care how much it cost

in the eyes of the client, it may come off as bold.

It certainly is bold and don't be fooled, there is a reasonable chance their rankings will get worse before they get better. In some cases when we perform a cleanup like this we'll see a brief drop before a steady improvement.

This doesn't happen all the time by any means, in fact we did a smaller scale version of this last week for two new clients and both have already started moving ahead over the weekend without a drop in rankings prior. It's really just about managing expectations and pitching the long term benefit over the short term fear.

Just be very careful in the way you project-manage it - be meticulous with updating internal links and 301 any pages that have external links pointing to them as well. You want to end up with a clean, efficient and crawlable website that retains as much value as possible.

You understand many sets of eyes are directed at them and a lot is to gain.

Also a very valid concern!

I'm probably not telling you anything you don't already know anyhow so don't think I'm trying to lecture you on how to do your job, just sharing my knowledge and anecdotal evidence on similar things.

[Charles-O]

Hey Chris!

Thanks for that lenghty response. It is very much appreciated and so is your offer for help. Let me check with some people to see if I can share the company's name.
[EDIT] Sent you a private msg

One of the reason I want to test the waters is, to be real honest, I feel weird to recommend shaving 3/4 of their site on which they put a lot of money in. I guess it comes down to reassuring them that these changes will be positive, but in the eyes of the client, it may come off as bold.

Another thing is, it is an international business that have different teams for different country. For more than 20 countries, they are the only one to try and sell their product online. You understand many sets of eyes are directed at them and a lot is to gain.

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Charles,

That's a tough one! I definitely see the motivation to test the waters here first before you go spending time on it but it will likely take less time than you think and either way, the user experience will be significantly better once you're done so I'd expect that either way, your time/dev investment would likely be viable.

I suppose you could block certain sections via Robots and wait to measure the results but I'd be more inclined to throw on the gloves and get elbow deep!

You've already mentioned the issues the current structure causes so you are aware of them which is great. With those in mind, focus on the user experience. What is it they're looking for on your site? How would they expect to find it? Can they find the solution with as few clicks as practical?

Rand did a Whiteboard Friday recently on Cleaning up the Cruft which was a great overview of the broader areas you can often trim your site back down to size. For me anyway, the aim is to have as few pages on the site as practical. If a page(s), category, tag etc doesn't need to exist then just remove it!

It's hard to say or to give specific advice here without seeing your site but chances are if you were to sit down and physically map out your website you'd find a lot of redundancy that, once fixed, would cut your million pages down to a significantly more manageable number. A recent example of this for us was a client who had a bunch of redundant blog categories and tags as well as multiple versions of some URLs due to poor internal linking. We cut their total URL volume from over 300 to just 78 and that alone was enough to significantly improve their search visibility.

I'd be happy to take a closer look at this one if you're willing to share your URL, though I understand if you're not. Either way, the best place to start here will be reviewing your site structure and seeing if it truly makes sense.