What's the best was to structure Product page information on my site?
-
Hi -
I run a hobby related niche new / article / resource site (http://tinyurl.com/4eavaj4). One of the most critical components of the site is our product database. We don't actually sell anything directly - instead we monetize them by displaying relevant affiliate product feeds and price comparisons.
However since the Panda update was implemented in February my traffic (particularly my long tail, product related traffic) has dropped off considerably. I had about a 20% drop in overall traffic, but have made up some of the ground in the past week. However I want to know once and for all how I should structure my product related information as I have a ton of great content that is ready to be published in this section but want to be sure I structure it the best possible way from a SEO standpoint.
Here are a few different options I've come up with for displaying information about products on my site. For the purpose of these examples I am going to refer to all of the information that makes up my product pages collectively as "product profiles". Please let me know which is the best SEO wise (or if you have a better way of doing it let me know):
- Option 1 - Current Method - Divide Content Sections into different pages / urls
Example: http://tinyurl.com/4tpdlbl
This is how the majority of my product profiles are currently structured. I did this to improve load times and to keep the total number of links per page down. In addition to the core product profile subpages: "Product Details","Compare Prices", **"**Product Review", "Hot Auctions", and "Checklists", I have the Checklists area further segmented by subset, each of which is on its own page that is only accessible through the main Checklists tab of the profile.
- Option 2 - Everything on one url / page the old fashioned way, with everything available by scrolling vertically.
This would make the page go on forever though.
- Option 3 - Everything on one url / page, but visually segmented using css / javascript tabs.
Example: http://tinyurl.com/4kqhauh
I looked at the source code and all the page text is there, so it looks like it would be spider-able but you tell me. Or would another method of tabbing be better? My site is wordpress based so the functionality comes from a plugin.
- Option 4 - Use post tabs that are technically all on the same page, but make each individual tab be accessible through its own suburl, all of which share the same core canonical url.
Example: http://tinyurl.com/4bs9pjs
Clicking on any of the individual tabs will result in something like ?postTabs=2 being appended to the core url. Example: http://tinyurl.com/4gvgufc
Any input would be greatly appreciated asap!
Thanks
Mike
-
Hey Mike
I have a site, it lost about 80% of traffic on the 7th of February. I have seen that there was some talk of results changing in the UK on the 7th but this one site has been hammered.
It's annoying really as the major competitor is almost a perfect case for how to cheat. The business provides several services all from one site as does the one I manage. But, they also have the URLs for each of these services and use them as single pages designed to throw the user to the main site (duh - doorway pages) but... the thing is, it works for them, has worked for years and years and on this last update, it seems to be getting better.
Really annoying and likewise, I have not had any good feedback as to what the problem may be from other SEO folks I know.
So, good folks of SEOMoz - any ideas on this one? It may help me figure out what has gone wrong with my fathers site as well which is http://www.vinyltodigital.co.uk
Marcus
-
Marcus - Honestly I have no idea why my Google rankings dropped off. I've hired 2 different SEO experts to look into it and no one has been able to figure it out. My link profile is totally white hat and stronger then the majority of my competitors, I have 4000+ or so pages of unique, high quality content, am a Google News source, and publish about 5 new unique articles every day. I ended up deleting a 100 or so thin video pages on my site, did some url reorganization (using 301s), and fixed all the broken links. That appeared to be helping as my traffic was returning to normal. Then the bottom dropped out again. Since Saturday my daily traffic has dropped by 50%. I am really baffled at this point as to what to do so any help would be sincerely appreciated. Thanks, Mike
-
Hey
Having a quick look, the current way you are doing things seems pretty sensible to me from a user perspective as you have separate landing pages for each section of information along with smaller pages, less links per page etc.
You say the drop off is post panda so is the structure of your site the problem? Did you have loads of poor quality links to these pages that have suddenly lost traction or could it be that some of the pages are mainly featuring content from ebay (hot auctions etc).
When you said you have made some ground getting traffic back, what have you been doing to improve things so far?
Not tons of help, sorry but I am not sure if it's the structure of the pages that is the problem here.
Marcus
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
-
Business Services via Index Page or Dedicated Pages?
We're in the process of building a new website for our Business (B2B Event Services) and we've hit a design snag. Our designer wants to combine all of our business services information (there are six service lines) into a single Index Page titled "Services". Beyond this creating a needlessly long page to scroll through, I'm worried this will negatively impact our ability to SEO for each service line, as we wouldn't have any intention of letting people visit the individual pages from within the site. Our current site features individual pages which, in my opinion, is how we should build our new site. That being said, I'm completely open to any ideas that will further enhance usability and searchability. Any clarification would be greatly appreciated!
Web Design | | SHWorldwide1 -
Woocommerce SEO and Product attributes
Hi friends! I have a question that is advanced Woocommerce and seo-related.
Web Design | | JustinMurray
I'm seeing http://www.mywebsitex.com/pa_keyword/indexed in Google, but it cannot be properly optimized, and I would prefer to have a WordPress Page indexed for that keyword instead, which also lists those products and can be fully seo optimized. Woocommerce SEO plugin by Yoast lacks documentation and I have no clue if that would even fix this. I do have the Taxonomy (pa_keyword) set to not include these in the sitemap, but there doesn't seem to be a way to noindex/nofollow product attributes.
1. How can I best accomplish this?
2. Why are product attributes indexed by default?0 -
Why would a developer build all page content in php?
Picked up a new client. Site is built on Wordpress. Previous developer built nearly all page content in their custom theme's PHP files. In other words, the theme's "page.php" file contains virtually all the HTML for each of the site's pages. Each individual page's back-end page editor appears blank, except for some of the page text. No markup, no widgets, no custom fields. And no dedicated, page-specific php files either. Pages are differentiated within page.php using: elseif (is_page("27") Has anyone ever come across this approach before? Why might someone do this?
Web Design | | mphdavidson0 -
Worth Splitting Up Main Site into Several Microsites?
The company I work for offers a variety of very different products, that are sold to different audiences. Right now (and for the past 4 years) all the products have been listed on one main website. Over the years, we have accumulated over 200,000 links and rank relatively well in most of the product-specific keywords. Still, for business purposes we really feel that having a unique site specific to each product would be more beneficial than having them all on one site. What are the pros and cons of making a move to different subdomains from a main site. (i.e. instead of www.cleanedison.com/solar we would set up a solar.cleanedison.com)
Web Design | | CleanEdisonInc0 -
Time On Site and SEO?
Does time on site impact rankings? If a person visits your site from the serps or directly visits it by typing in your name in the search field and then leaves within a minute, will that impact your serps? What is the best way to increase time on site?
Web Design | | bronxpad0 -
Splash Pages For App Downlowds
Hi, We currently have a very simple splash page that Android and iPhone users see when they land on our homepage. The screen gives them the option to download our app or move on to the full website. If they choose to go to the site they are redirected to our homepage. Is this going to have any negative impacts on our rankings? I'm not sure how the Google bot treats this type of page. We have also talked about replacing the splash page with a modal window, but I'm concerned that this will increase the load time of the home page on mobile devices. Does anyone have any experience with a similar situation or any advice? Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | Cash4Books0 -
Managing international sites
Hi all, I am trying to figure out the best way to manage our international sites. We have two locations, 1 in the UK and 1 in the USA. I currently use GEOIP to identify the location of the browser and redirect them using a cookie to index.php?country=uk or index.php?country=usa. Once the cookie is set I use a 301 redirect to send them to index.php, so that Google doesnt see each url as duplicate content, which Webmaster tools was complaining about. This has been working wonderfully for about a year. It means I have a single php language include file and depending on the browser location I will display $ or £ and change the odd ise to ize, etc. Problem I am starting to notice is that we are starting to rank better and better in the USA search result. I am guessing this is because the crawlers must be based out of the USA. This is great, but my concern is that I am losing rank in the UK, which is currently where most of our business is done out of... So I have done my research and because I have a .net will go for a /uk/ or /us/ sub folder and create two separate webmaster tools site and set them up to target each geographic location. Is this okay? http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192#2 HERE IS THE PROBLEM: I don't was to have to run two separate website with two separate sets of copy. Also, I dont want to lose all the rank data on urls like: http://www.mysite.net/great-rank-result.html now becomes http://www.mysite.net/uk/great-rank-result.html. On top of this I will have two pages, the one just mentioned and now adding http://www.mysite.net/us/great-rank-result.html, which I presume would be seen as duplicate copy? (Y/n) Can I use rel canonical to overcome this? How can I don't this without actually running the two pages. Could you actually have 1 site in the root folder and just use the same GEOIP techology to do a smart MOD REWRITE adding either UK or US to the url therefore being able to create two webmaster accounts targeting each geographic location? Any advise is most welcome.
Web Design | | Mediatomcat0 -
Number of links per page?
I'm confused by the number of links that we should put on a page. Our site has a high domain authority but SEOmoz tool and others, plus Google WMT suggests much much less than other sites have - look at Dailymail.co.uk or the Huff post site for example. our site is www.worldtravelguide.net and I'm thinking specifically about the /destinations and each continent like /europe Our site has thousands of pages, trying to create an effective internal linking structure with the limitation of 150 or so links is nearly impossible and ends up with too many navigational pages. We were hit hard by Panda (even though all our content is original, professionally written frequently updated) in favour of bigger brands and considering Google suggests that sites should be designed for users and not SEO these two ideals conflict. Does anyone have any data on what the link limit is? Any other tips or observations would be gratefully received. Thanks, John
Web Design | | JohnFinlayson0