Page HTML great for humans, but seems to be very bad for bots?
-
We recently switched platforms and use Joomla for our website. Our product page underwent a huge transformation and it seems to be user friendly for a human, but when you look at one of our product pages in SEOBrowser it seems that we are doing a horrible job optimizing the page and our html almost makes us look spammy.
Here is an example or a product page on our site:
http://urbanitystudios.com/custom-invitations-and-announcements/shop-by-event/cocktail/beer-mug
And, if you take a look in something like SEObrowser, it makes us look not so good.
For example, all of our footer and header links show up. Our color picker is a bunch of pngs (over 60 to be exact), our tabs are the same (except for product description and reviews) on every single product page...
In thinking about the bots:
1-How do we handle all of the links from footer, header and the same content in the tabs
2-How do we signal to them that all that is important on the page is the description of the product?
3-We installed schema for price and product image, etc but can we take it further?
4-How do we handle the "attribute" section (i.e. our color picker, our text input, etc).
Any clarification I need to provide, please let me know.
-
out of curiosity, what did you think this page was for? thanks for your insight.
-
Just being honest....
I had absolutely no idea that this was a page for designing an invitation. None at all - until I read your reply.
If this was my site I would not allow a cool color picker or a coding challenge or whatever to compromise my success by pushing the description down under. I would find a way to make it work because I bet this will kill the conversion rate.
It's easier to double your income from current traffic that it is to double your traffic.
-
Hi EGOL,
Completely agree on beefing up the content as well as making the product name more relevant. We have run into cannibalization issues before so we have made our product names less competitive with our category pages and are working on making the page titles incredibly relevant (so we haven't done this yet, but Beer Mug Party Invitation) would be an example of what we'll change the page title to.
We struggle with bringing product description above the fold because the call to action is to play with the colors and see how customizable, flexible our products really are. We don't want folks to miss that by first seeing the product description.
As far as our HTML of the page, however, what are your thoughts on that. You'll see that the color picker (for example) pulls 66 pngs right in a row with a bunch of random numbers...tells the bot nothing of the page. However, that is how the code is built to make the interface work.
-
First I would try to serve visitors by getting the product description up above the fold and immediately visible by the people who visit the website.
Second, I would expand the title tag because "Beer Mug" puts you into generic competition when you want to compete for easier SERPs such as "custom printed beer mug" (or appropriate language for your product).
Third, your description is really really short. I honestly believe that it has a very good chance of being filtered for trivial content. So, I would take my most important product first and start beefing up the description. As you do that you will add more relevant words to the page so in addition to making your content above trivial you will be qalifying for long tail traffic. Another benefit is that it adds sales appeal and reduces the number of questions that come in by email and phone.
At my office we spend lots of time improving trival content. I spend a hundred hours a month on that. Taking twenty word pages with one image and improving them to 200 word pages with four images. That is for retail pages. Informative pages go up to over a thousand words eight images and a video. (those numbers are just examples - we don't have word count goals). The payback in traffic can be very high if you are in a busy niche and have a site with a little authority.
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
-
Does it make sense to create new pages with friendlier URLs then redirect old pages to new?
Hi Moz! My client has messy URLs. does it make sense to write new clean URLs, then 301 redirect all old URLs to the new ones? Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Why is page still indexing?
Hi all, I have a few pages that - despite having a robots meta tag and no follow, no index, they are showing up in Google SERPs. In troubleshooting this with my team, it was brought up that another page could be linking to these pages and causing this. Is that plausible? How could I confirm that? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SSFCU
Sarah0 -
Link Removal Request Sent to Google, Bad Pages Gone from Index But Still Appear in Webmaster Tools
| On June 14th the number of indexed pages for our website on Google Webmaster tools increased from 676 to 851 pages. Our ranking and traffic have taken a big hit since then. The increase in indexed pages is linked to a design upgrade of our website. The upgrade was made June 6th. No new URLS were added. A few forms were changed, the sidebar and header were redesigned. Also, Google Tag Manager was added to the site. My SEO provider, a reputable firm endorsed by MOZ, believes the extra 175 pages indexed by Google, pages that do not offer much content, may be causing the ranking decline. My developer submitted a page removal request to Google via Webmaster tools around June 20th. Now when a Google search is done for site:www.nyc-officespace-leader.com 851 results display. Would these extra pages cause a drop in ranking? My developer issued a link removal request for these pages around June 20th and the number in the Google search results appeared to drop to 451 for a few days, now it is back up to 851. In Google Webmaster Tools it is still listed as 851 pages. My ranking drop more and more everyday. At the end of displayed Google Search Results for site:www.nyc-officespace-leader.comvery strange URSL are displaying like:www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/wp-content/plugins/... If we can get rid of these issues should ranking return to what it was before?I suspect this is an issue with sitemaps and Robot text. Are there any firms or coders who specialize in this? My developer has really dropped the ball. Thanks everyone!! Alan |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Content per page?
We used to have an articles worth of content in a scroll box created by our previous SEO, the problem was that it was very much keyword stuffed, link stuffed and complete crap. We then removed this and added more content above the fold, the problem I have is that we are only able to add 150 - 250 words above the fold and a bit of that is repetition across the pages. Would we benefit from putting an article at the bottom of each of our product pages, and when I say article I mean high quality in depth content that will go into a lot more detail about the product, history and more. Would this help our SEO (give the page more uniqueness and authority rather than 200 - 250 word pages). If I could see one problem it would be would an articles worth of content be ok at the bottom of the page and at that in a div tab or scroll box.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Software to monitor indexed pages
Dear SEO moz, As a SEO marketer on a pretty big website I noticed a HUGE amount of dropping pages indexed by google. We did not do anything to block googleblot in the past 6 months, but since November the number of indexed pages decreased from 3.4 milion (3,400.000) to 7 hundred thousand (700,000). Obviously I want to know which pages are de-indexed. Does anyone you know a tool which can do this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JorisHas1 -
Taking out a .html plugin
We are currently working on a new site structure and we would like to take out a WP plugin that adds a .html to the end of every URL. From my understanding it is best to not use this plug in. Once I take out this plug in will I need to do anything for all the external links to count. Will the link juice pass through? if you type my url now without the .html in your browser it adds it in the .html. However, all the external links we built have the .html in the URL link. Do I need to do any 301 or canonical to pass link juice or will I be fine after taking out the plug in?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Not sure why Home page is outranked by less optimized internal pages.
We launched our website just three weeks ago, and one of our primary keyword phrases is "e-business consultants". Here's what I don't get. Our home page is the page most optimized around this search phrase. Using SEOmoz On-Page Optimization tool, the home page scores an "A". And yet it doesn't rank in the top 50 on Google Canada, although two other INTERNAL pages - www.ebusinessconsultants.ca/about/consulting-team/ & /www.ebusinessconsultants.ca/about/consulting-approach/ - rank 5 & 6 on Google Canada, even though they only score a grade "C" for on-page optimization for this keyword phrase. I've always understood that the home page is the most powerful page. Why are these others outranking it? I checked the crawl and Google Webmaster, and there is no obvious problem on the home page. Is this because the site is so new? It goes against all previous experience I've had in similar situation. Any guidance/ insight would be highly appreciated!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | axelk0 -
High number of items per page or low number with more category pages?
In SEO terms, what would be the best method: High number of items per page or low number with more pages? For example, this category listing here: http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/90/fsx-civil-aircraft/ It has 10 items per page. Would there be any benefit of changing a listing like that to 20 items in order to decrease the number of pages in the category? Also, what other ways could you increase the SEO of category listings like that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640