How would you deal with eCommerce sorts?
-
I am reviewing a website that has different activities, and there are many ways to sort them. The issue is that the website is essentially displaying the same information, but in different sorts. Take a look at this search page:
http://www.kijubi.com/AC-Fishing
You are looking for fishing trips here, but you can sort it by city, region, and category. I have decided to "no index" some of these sorts, but I am afraid they might be picking up some long tail traffic on the city and region sorts. For example, "newport beach fishing trips", something like that.
Any suggestions on how to deal with removing all of these duplicate sorts, while still maintaining the traffic that may be received by sorting with some long tail terms?
-
Nice answer
-
I'd expand on Ryan's suggestion as a consideration to just say that you need to be aware that Google continues to work on figuring out how to tap into AJAX accessed content. They may be bad at it now (they are), yet one day they could eventually have it figured out, at which point the duplicate content issue comes back.
Might not be in the next short while - maybe never, yet something to be aware of.
-
Good answer.
-
I would change the sorting to be dynamic, probably with AJAX. That way your users still get the feature but you're not duplicating your content across URLs. I'd target the long tail with landing pages, rather than re-sorted copies of my content.
-
we found ourselves in this very position and it was at a point where we were looking out for issues for a site not indexing.
We removed it but then again you find many examples where it isnt a major issue. Maybe try to combat that with canonicals ?
-
I always recommend clients implement either noindex/follow on sort methods, or block sorting altogether (the first choice being preferred). If there are specific sort methods that consistently provide valuable conversions, these can be considered to be set up as a separate "evergreen" link on the site, but where you would need to add unique content to the page - enough to ensure it reduces (as much as possible) the duplicate content factor.
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
-
Writing cornerstone content for a shop (eCommerce) website
Hi there I am trying to optimise my site to the best that it can be. Since the most recent Google updates, everything that I reading is saying cornerstone content with lots of valuable content is a really good strategy as it tells Google what is the most important content on your site. Writing articles that are well structured and have give the user a detailed overview of that subject. Lots of top SEO's are saying 3000 words plus on these pages. My question is, how do I go about this with and eCommerce site? Obviously that majority of the keywords that I want to target are product related and these are the pages that I want to come up in the search. How do I go about creating cornerstone content for these pages? I am thinking that one of my cornerstone pieces of content would be "The Ultimate Guide to [my main product category]". But that product has numerous products related to it, all of which have their own keywords, so how would this help the products to rank? The site had two main product categories, with numerous products under each of those categories. The two main categories are targeting my best performing keywords, but currently the landing page for these is the main product category pages. I am really struggling to work out the best strategy here. The content that I have on my actual products pages is comprehensive and covers a lot of detail about that particular product and has started to rank for product keywords, but I am guessing Google wouldn't consider that to be cornerstone content. I hope this make sense. Any advice anyone can give would be really useful. Many thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | Clojobobo1 -
Potential new URL structure for my ecommerce site
At the moment my site suffers from a flat product category structure where over 600 items fall into one category alone. This category is then filtered using a faceted search which appends query strings to the category URL and changes the products displayed on the page. At the moment our product category URL is as follows, www.domain.com/category/greeting-cards and this holds all cards including occasions such as anniversary, birthdays etc and also themes such as animal cards, contemporary cards etc I have proposed changes to my developer to change this structure to include subcategories. I can now go two subcategories deep. For example, "greeting cards > occasions > birthday cards" or "greeting cards > themes > animals". This is reflected in the new URL structure, which has been proposed, www.domain.com/greeting-cards/occasions/birthday-cards. In this URL do I need "occasions" in the URL as I don't think it adds much value to the user? Would I be better of having www.domain.com/greeting-cards/birthday-cards. If a user searches for "birthday cards" then I think this would be more relevant?
On-Page Optimization | | joe-ainswoth0 -
Ecommerce product rankings tank when procuct out of stock
When checking our weekly ranking update this morning I noticed that several products where down 2-3 pages (or even dropped from the first 50) from last week. Looking through these products, they share one common trait: these pages are for products that are no longer available or are temporarily out of stock (and have been for the last few weeks). I understand Google is looking at bounce rates, but do they also looks at our website (or Schema markup) to see if the product is in stock or not? We also use Google Shopping to they should have a pretty good understanding of our stock levels and the general availability of our products. If it's just a question of bounce rates, we could switch to pre-orders for our products (we don't take any order for out-of-stock products at the moment) or we could offer the more expensive versions with a discount. If Google is looking at inventory status, we could disable this to keep ranking high and increase our search presence. Any drawbacks on this? Just getting back in the SEO-game after a focus on the business processes so I could use some help here. We seen great improvements where we've stepped up and created great product descriptions, but it is really disheartening seeing products get dropped so easily.
On-Page Optimization | | HDPHNS0 -
I'm looking to put a quite length FAQs tab on product pages on an ecommerce site. Am I likely to have duplicate content issues?
On an ecommerce site we have unique content on the product pages (i.e. descriptions), as well as the usual delivery and returns tabs for customer convenience. From this we haven't had any duplicate content issues or warnings, which seems to be the case industry-wide. However, we're looking to add a more lengthy FAQs tab which is still highly relevant to the customer but contains a lot more text than the other tabs. The product descriptions are also relatively small. Do you think this will cause potential duplicate content issues or should it be treated the same as a delivery tab, for instance?
On-Page Optimization | | creativemay0 -
Dealing with a 404
Hi there, I have an error on one of my campaigns. It says that it gets a 404on this page: http://www.datasat.com/tetra/white-paper.htmlWEhjdAfgkh However, I cannot replicate the above URL as it doesn't exist on the site. The end of the URL has some spurious characters which I don't know how they got there. Has anyone any ideas about what's happening and how I can sort it? Many thanks
On-Page Optimization | | iain0 -
Keyword Cannibalization/stuffing on an ecommerce category page
Hi, Whats the best way to tackle e-commerce category pages? If you have, say, a category showing 30 pairs of socks, and each of the sock products in the lists has a 'view more' link, a link from the product name and a link from the thumbnail. Naturally each of those links should be the product name - sprinkled with a slight variation, a preceding 'View more on [product name]' or superseded with the shop name, so you dont end up with complete duplicate link titles, you get the idea. But you suddenly end up with 90 instances of links with title tags containing 'socks', which ultimately lead to keyword stuffing/cannibalization - especially as you then move to another category with, say, sports socks showing 40 products and therefore 120 link titles also with the word 'socks' Thought on a postcard please? Thanks Tom
On-Page Optimization | | pretige120 -
ECommerce Product Meta Descriptions vs. Product Descriptions
Wondering if using on-page product descriptions as the individual product meta descriptions is a best practice for an eCommerce site? Instead of writing two product descriptions (one regular and one meta), I am thinking if the product copy is SEO rich, we'd be good to use just the one for both purposes. Thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions? Seems that many companies follow this practice. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | kennyrowe1 -
Is having the word catalog in an ecommerce site url detrimental to seo.
IS: www.example.com/catalog/category%/product% better than www.example.com/category%/product% category and product are dynamic values that change with the diff. categ. and products displayed while catalog is constant.
On-Page Optimization | | no6thgear0