Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Ecommerce good/bad? Showing product description on sub/category page?
-
Hi Mozers,
I have a ecommerce furniture website, and I have been wondering for some time if showing the product descriptions on the sub/category page helps the website.
If there is more content displayed on the subcategory, it should be more relevant, right?
OR does it not matter, as it is duplicate content from the product page.
I think showing the product descriptions on non-product pages is hurting my design/flow, but i worry that if I am to hide product content on sub/category pages my traffic will be hurt.
Despite my searches I have not found an answer yet.
Please take a look at my site and share your thoughts:
http://www.ecustomfinishes.com/
Chris
-
thank you everyone who contributed to this response, I found it very helpful. I will adjust my pages this morning, incase anyone checks back. If I see any dramatic SEO changes I will let you know.
Also this is my first time posting on SEOMOZ, loved it! What a cool feature.
-
Have a look at this Q&A which touches on similar points: http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-much-copy-should-there-be-on-a-category-page
I would get rid of the product descriptions on category pages - I think it is more an user-experience issues and I do think that having so much copy on the category pages it will weaken your category pages.
-
The category pages definitely don't look clean and professional right now, and that will impact conversion rate. You have enough copy on the category pages to establish relevancy, so I would be extremely surprised if your rankings went down after you stopped showing the product descriptions on the category pages.
If you're hesitant, would it be possible to test it both ways? Choose a couple of categories and pull the product descriptions off them. See what happens to their rankings and traffic.
-
I've only looked at a handful of pages / categories, but I am not sure that you are doing yourself too many favours.
In SEO terms I think that you are undermining your unique content pages. By repeating the unique content from the product pages on to the category pages you are effectively introducing duplicates. Yes, it is your own content, but spreading it across those pages is unlikely to do you many favours.
More importantly it's also pretty confusing in places. Some of those categories are quite off putting.
What would I do?
- Remove those descriptions from the cat pages
- Add category descriptions
- Try to flesh out the product descriptions with more unique content and keep an eye out for those that duplicate each other.
I hope that helps.
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
-
My site is showing indexed in search console but not appearing in Serps
hi, i have recently made sites.google site and submitted to search console but when I copy paste in google , its not appearing
Algorithm Updates | | alan-shultis0 -
Is it necessary to have unique H1's for pages in a pagination series (i.e. blog)?
A content issue that we're experiencing includes duplicate H1 issues within pages in a pagination series (i.e. blog). Does each separate page within the pagination need a unique H1 tag, or, since each page has unique content (different blog snippets on each page), is it safe to disregard this? Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | BopDesign0 -
Log-in page ranking instead of homepage due to high traffic on login page! How to avoid?
Hi all, Our log-in page is ranking in SERP instead of homepage and some times both pages rank for the primary keyword we targeted. We have even dropped. I am looking for a solution for this. Three points here to consider is: Our log-in page is the most visited page and landing page on the website. Even there is the primary keyword in this page or not; same scenario continues Log-in page is the first link bots touch when they crawling any page of our website as log-in page is linked on top navigation menu If we move login page to sub-domain, will it works? I am worrying that we loose so much traffic to our website which will be taken away from log-in page sub domain Please guide with your valuable suggestions. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Flat Structure URL vs Structured Sub-directory URL
We are finally taking our classifieds site forward and moving into a much improved URL structure, however, there is some disagreement over whether to go with a Flat URL structure or a structured sub-directory. I've browsed all of the posts and Q&A's for this going back to 2011, and still don't feel like I have a real answer. Has anyone tested this yet, or is there any consensus over ranking? I am in a disagreement with another SEO manager about this for our proposed URL structure redesign who is for it because it is what our competitors are doing. Our classifieds are geographically based, and we group by state, county, and city. Most of our traffic comes from state and county based searches. We also would like to integrate categories into the URL for some of the major search terms we see. The disagreement arises around how to structure the site. I prefer the logical sub-directory style: [sitename]/[category]/[state]/[county]/
Algorithm Updates | | newspore
mysite.com/for-sale/california/kern-county/
or
[sitename]/[category]/[county]-county-[stateabb]/
mysite.com/for-sale/kern-county-ca/ I don't mind the second, except for when you look at it in the context of the whole site: Geo Landing Pages:
mysite.com/california/
mysite.com/los-angeles-ca-90210/ Actual Search Pages:
mysite.com/for-sale/orange-ca/[filters] Detail Pages:
mysite.com/widget-type/cool-product-name/productid I want to make sure this flat structure performs better before sacrificing my analytics sanity (and ordered logic). Any case studies, tests or real data around this would be most helpful, someone at Moz must've tackled this by now!0 -
Ecommerce or E-commerce as a Keyword?
I have done a good bit of research but am not sure which word to focus on. I feel that the trend is moving towards no hyphen but I do not have any data to justify that other than google trends. Here is the research I found: Google Trends says ecommerce is more popular
Algorithm Updates | | Manseo
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=e-commerce%2C%20ecommerce&cmpt=q Ngram says e-commerce
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=ecommerce%2Ce-commerce&year_start=1990&year_end=2013&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cecommerce%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ce%20-%20commerce%3B%2Cc0 Google Adwords Keyword tool says e-commerce:
e-commerce has 33,100 monthly search volume
ecommerce has 14,800 monthly search volume What do you think, will ecommerce overtake e-commerce in the future monthly search volumes? Ecommerce or E-commerce?0 -
Is a slash just as good as buying a country specific domain? .com/de vs .de
I guess this question comes in a few parts: 1. Would Google read a 2-letter country code that is after the domain name (after the slash) and recognize it as a location (targeting that country)? Or does is just read it as it would a word. eg. www.marketing.com/de for a microsite for the Germans www.marketing.com/fr for a microsite for the French Or would it read the de and fr as words (not locations) in the url. In which case, would it have worse SEO (as people would tend to search "marketing france" not "marketing fr")? 2. Which is better for SEO and rankings? Separate country specific domains: www.marketing.de and www.marketing.fr OR the use of subfolders in the url: www.marketing.com/de and www.marketing.com/fr
Algorithm Updates | | richardstrange0 -
Using Brand Name in Page titles
Is it a good practice to append our brand name at the end of every page title? We have a very strong brand name but it is also long. Right now what we are doing is saying: Product Name | Long brand name here Product Category | Long brand name here Is this the right way to do it or should we just be going with ONLY the product and category names in our page titles? Right now we often exceed the 70 character recommendation limit.
Algorithm Updates | | mlentner1 -
Importance of Product Review Syndication?
Greetings everyone I have been tasked to do research on just how important it is to have product reviews syndicated with Google's (star rating found in Google Shopping). I am unable to find any research reports or studies on this nor any quantitative data on it's impact, beneficial or otherwise. If any of you folks have any first hand experiences, perhaps some before and after figures, that would be great. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | airnwater0