An ecomerce seo question
-
Looking for a few opinions on this please...Trying to reduce the number of pages I have to seo to rank on my websites and at the same time avoid the google over optimisation issues.
Previously on our ecomerce websites we would have a category page for, say, 12 times, we would then seo that page for generic terms related to the page; ie, blue dress, cheap blue dress, blue party dress etc. The individual product pages would then be seoed with the title and h1 tags containing the exact product name and the url containing the product name too. This worked fine but we are suffering from some duplicate content issues of late (the products are mixture of few unique items and probably 95% imported affiliate datafeeds) as we have an average of 80,000 products per store we have neither the time nor the staff to rewrite everything (the products update daily directly from the merchants so would need to be done daily)
What we are planning on moving toward is blocking the individual product pages from Google and instead putting all efforts into the category pages. The category page will contain plenty of quality unique content related to the category so the only duplicate content would be a line of the product name and price.
Whilst we would still rank the category page for broad keywords we also would like to now rank the category page for 16 individual product names as there is a good profit to make made by the sheer volume of product names we plan on ranking for. Obviously we could not get all the products into the url and the page title as that would be silly but would it be acceptable to have multiple h2 tags on the page, each with a different entry, the product names (H1 will be saved for the category name).
We can easily bold these keywords to help in the optimisation as per the seo moz onsite analysis tool and we can add image text to ensure the product name is featured at least twice on the page.
As so few sites actually seo for the long tail product names, most retailers rank by virtue of their domain quality alone, our onsite seo doesn't have to be 100% but getting the best we can out of the page will help the efforts.
Many thanks
Carl
-
Hi EGOL
Thanks for the reply, your idea about 'uniquifying' (I feel I may have made a word up there hehe) the product pages is certainly one I have been considering. It does raise a couple of issues however. Firstly, I would need to get a considerable amount of data on the products to see which ones are selling. This would need to be long enough to remove any seasonal variations in the stats.
The second issue is that the affiliate products pull from merchant data feeds so any changes I make to the content will get overwritten.
The idea of uniquifying (if I use it enough it might become a 'proper' word!!!) certain pages is one I am open to doing on my smaller sites but for the larger sites it could pose some issues. An example site can be found at www ukchic co uk - have taken out the dots incase people thought I was posting the url for a cheeky backlink
-
I understand why you plan to block the individual product pages from ranking. I would probably do the same thing.
You can add multiple h2 tags to category pages but I don't think that you will get a lot of benefit from that.
Have you considered picking the best 50 products and writing unique content for the product pages and allowing those unique content pages to be indexed? If you get a good return on them then do another 50.
That's what I would do.
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
-
Ignore SEO and traffic/calls dropped
I got caught up in a disaster of a website that consumed 3/4 of a year, all the while our SEO was put on the backburner with only occasional "massaging" to keep it going. Now our traffic has dropped almost 25% along with our incoming calls. Our rankings have remained steadily good- medium but definitely not bad during this period. My question: Who else has had this experience and how long did it take to rebound? TY
On-Page Optimization | | KevnJr
KJr0 -
SEO and auto login with redirect
Hi, we have a site where user we know (cookie-based) is automatic redirected to private internal page. Unknown guests are staying on the page google search sent them. The redirect is done with a 302 to the private page. When I examine organic search and landing pages in analytics I see that more than 50% of the landing pages are private pages (inaccessible for the google-bot). This is because analytics does not register the redirecting page, just the target page. Is this harmful to SEO that so many users are redirected to other pages, or is this data not available to google-bot. The google bots is not redirect since they do not have the correct credentials. Do chrome or analytics send such data back to Google search? Is better to manipulate analytics page track call to use the address of the redirecting page? Or maybe skip to redirect, and just render the private content on the orginal page?
On-Page Optimization | | Morten.Berg0 -
SEO and multilanguage site
Hi all! I have used a wordpress plugin called WPML which translates a webpage into another language so that I have a webpage in two different languages (spanish (main market) and english). I'm just doing the seo for the spanish market and I'm gonna start with the seo for the english one. Should I do it just the same as I had a one-single-language page? just with english keywords, etc. I guessit would only differ in the way I do the linkbuilding strategy as the markets are different Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr0 -
How do I best SEO optimize a landing page that is mostly graphics?
I have a social networking website built on a SocialEngine platform. All of the pages (except the home page) are password protected for members only. My web designer wants the home page to be primarily graphics - not text. It looks nice, but with no substantial copy on the page, can I still get the page to rank well with just meta title, description and keywords (even when those keywords aren't actually on the page?) What's the best way to handle this? Kim
On-Page Optimization | | KimCalvert0 -
Developer comments in code & SEO
A client of mine has provided an SEO report that states:- "The inclusion of comments by developers in the coe is common practice..... ....its is not positive to leave large blocks of code in the site as makes crawling difficult to crawl" Im thinking that this has no SEO import at all, any one come across this? Thanks z z1eEy
On-Page Optimization | | zabba0 -
Is 302 Redirect a bad thing in SEO terms?
I am getting a lot of "302 (Temporary Redirects) = True" on many of my product URL's. What does it mean? Is it a bad thing to get these redirects? And how to fix them? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | SEOish0 -
Best site structure for SEO
Hi, I'm currently in the process of redesigning/rebuilding a well ranking but a dated looking and structured website. Using analytics info I'm trying to put togerther an optimied site map plan for the site based on keywords. Currently the site is structured like this (a few examples) for some of its best ranking keywords / landing pages www.companyname.co.uk/frames/software/companyname-software/keyword/overview.php www.companyname.co.uk/frames/software/companyname-software/keyword/keyword.php I'd like to simplfy this as part of the re build so url's look like this www.companyname.co.uk/companyname-software/softwarecatogry/keyword Obviously I would 201 the old urls. My question is : A. is this a good idea? (From what I've read it is?) B. is there any benifit from having the company name repeated in the url (ie www.companyname.co.uk/companyname-software). My thinking before this is that companyname-software currently ranks well and brings a good amount of traffic. Or should I just go with www.companyname.co.uk/software/softwarecatogry/keyword as opposed to www.companyname.co.uk/companyname-software/softwarecatogry/keyword? Many thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | JamesJacobs0