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 not Indexing images on CDN.
My URL is: https://bit.ly/2hWAApQ We have set up a CDN on our own domain: https://bit.ly/2KspW3C We have a main xml sitemap: https://bit.ly/2rd2jEb and https://bit.ly/2JMu7GB is one the sub sitemaps with images listed within. The image sitemap uses the CDN URLs. We verified the CDN subdomain in GWT. The robots.txt does not restrict any of the photos: https://bit.ly/2FAWJjk. Yet, GWT still reports none of our images on the CDN are indexed. I ve followed all the steps and still none of the images are being indexed. My problem seems similar to this ticket https://bit.ly/2FzUnBl but however different because we don't have a separate image sitemap but instead have listed image urls within the sitemaps itself. Can anyone help please? I will promptly respond to any queries. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TNZ
Deepinder0 -
Is site: a reliable method for getting full list of indexed pages?
The site:domain.com search seems to show less pages than it used to (Google and Bing). It doesn't relate to a specific site but all sites. For example, I will get "page 1 of about 3,000 results" but by the time I've paged through the results it will end and change to "page 24 of 201 results". In that example If I look in GSC it shows 1,932 indexed. Should I now accept the "pages" listed in site: is an unreliable metric?
Technical SEO | | bjalc20112 -
Getting a Vanity (Clean) URL indexed
Hello, I have a vanity (clean looking) URL that 302 redirects to the ugly version. So in other words http://www.site.com/url 302 >>> http://www.site.com/directory/directory/url.aspx What I'm trying to do is get the clean version to show up in search. However, for some reason Google only indexes the ugly version. cache:http://www.site.com/directory/directory/url.aspx is showing the ugly URL as cached and cache:http://www.site.com/url is showing not cached at all. Is there some way to force Google to index the clean version? Fetch as Google for the clean URL only returns a redirect status and canonicalizing the ugly to the clean would seem to send a strange message because of the redirect back to the ugly. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you,
Technical SEO | | Digi12340 -
Website being crawled but not indexed any thoughts?
Hi Everyone,
Technical SEO | | Ant71
I created a new website a few weeks ago www.drivingseaford.co.uk , did a little link citation, links from Google+, submitted to webmaster tools etc but its still not getting indexed. Webmaster tools crawl stats page is showing pages being crawled, no errors. But 0 indexed. http://www.drivingseaford.co.uk/robots.txt is showing User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-includes/ Im a bit stumped as never had this before!!! Any ideas from you lovely people?? Antony0 -
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 -
Site not indexing correctly
I am trying to figure out what is going on with my site listings. Google is only displaying my title and url - no description. You can see it when you search for Franchises for Sale. The site is www.franchisesolutions.com. Why could this happen? Also I saw a big drop off in a handful of keyword rankings today. Could this be related?
Technical SEO | | franchisesolutions0 -
Help removing duplicate content from the index?
Last week, after a significant drop in traffic, I noticed a subdomain in the index with duplicate content. The main site and subdomain can be found below. http://mobile17.com http://232315.mobile17.com/ I've 301'd everything on the subdomain to the appropriate location on the main site. Problem is, site: searches show me that if the subdomain content is being deindexed, it's happening really slowly. Traffic is still down about 50% in the last week or so... what's the best way to tackle this issue moving forward?
Technical SEO | | ccorlando0