Important keywords in product names
-
Hi!
among other we sell motorcycle clothing, which you can buy as a set (both jacket and pants) or single piece. Currently we name the products with the labeling in the beginning, e.g:
Motorcycle pants R2000, Motorcycle jacket R2000, Motorcycle kit R2000
Motorcycle pants R4000, Motorcycle jacket R4000, Motorcycle kit R4000
This is causing keyword stuffing and cannibalization in the category pages as all the product names include important keywords.
On the other hand it would be beneficial to keep the labeling in the name for search queries for the exact product.
What be your recommendations? I tend to take the labeling away.
-
Hi Tyler,
thank you for your quick reply. This is definitely great input, but yeah, my description of the problem wasn't quite clear. Sorry for that.
The issue right now is, that we have category pages with high keyword stuffing/ cannibalization. Following the example from above, our "motorcycle jackets" category page looks somewhat like this:
<a>Motorcycle jacket R2000</a>
<a>Motorcycle jacket R4000</a>
<a>Motorcycle jacket SuperCool</a>
<a>Motorcycle jacket Terminator</a>
etc.
And since the Motorcycle jacket category page shall be/ is the one ranking for keywords like "motorcycle jacket", we have a keyword cannibalization here.
On the other hand, if someone is searching for "motorcycle jacket R2000" if want to ensure the product page of the R2000 jacket is shown, not the product pages for the kit or the pants.
-
Without knowing the existing site architecture it is a little difficult to give a specific answer, but my two cents:
Are the 'like products' on the same page? For instance are...
Motorcycle pants R2000, Motorcycle jacket R2000, and Motorcycle kit R2000 on Page A
...and...
Motorcycle pants R4000, Motorcycle jacket R4000, and Motorcycle kit R4000 on Page B
...that is the image I am getting from your description.
Would it work with your site architecture to have a guide page for each category and then link to the product pages from there? The pants guide could talk about how amazing your motorcycle pants are, the relevant specs and about how wonderful your butt would look in a pair. The link could land on a product page that is a collection of all the pants you offer, it could be a link to the R2000 'set' page (where you sell all the products under one page), it could theoretically land on whatever you think is most user-friendly and would increase your ROI.
Ideally, and in my humble opinion, you would optimize your first page -however you choose to lay out the internal linking- for SEO and to show in relevant SERPs. Give some great original content; make that page have personality/establish your brand and brand persona (fun, serious, edgy, whatever); and something people would feel good about sharing with their buddies on facebook. Your awesome page on pants, for example, could be the canonical page and some appropriate usage of the 'rel=canonical' element could ensure that, if your user lands on the buy page (the one where all the size selections, etc... take place), that the linking metrics find their way to the page you want to rank, and have optimized for ranking, while the user happily shops and buys. This should avoid eating your own tail when it comes to talking about pants on subsequent pages -let's be honest, you can't sell pants without talking about pants.
I hope that this was clear and offered some sort of insight, but please take it only as a consideration which should be examined critically and with other options in mind. I am sure there are some other great ideas to be put forth and I would love to see some others post their thoughts!
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
-
Updating url name of a key page
One of my key pages has a url name that is completely non descriptive ('About') with no keywords in it that match the important content on that page. Should I create a new page with a proper url name and move the contents there (lose the authority of the current page), or create the url name only and redirect to the existing About page?
On-Page Optimization | | ppopov0 -
Is Brand name anchor text on a widget Spam
We have partial match penalty in WMT on one of our smaller sites. There are a few (less than 10) instances of widgets linking to us using our Brand Name as the anchor text. Would this fail a reconsideration request do you think? The widget links without the no-follow attribute.
On-Page Optimization | | Simonws0011 -
IMG ALT tags - should they be the same or the product title?
I have about 300 products. Should I make all my IMG ALT tags with my keywords, such as sea glass jewelry, sea glass necklace, sea glass bracelets? Or, should I make them what their title is, some of which do not pertain to the keyword, such as By the Sea. Some of my products do have keywords in them, but not all. I am hesitant on changing all the titles, as almost all URLs are indexed.
On-Page Optimization | | tiffany11030 -
Internal keyword linking - short or long string
I've seen a couple of people leave comments about keyword linking being too specific. If I"m doing a lot of internal keyword linking and I want to rank well for 'widgets', is it better that most of the links just use the word 'widgets' or should some of the links have more words in them. ie: 'red and blue widgets' - 'buy these widgets online' etc.
On-Page Optimization | | sparrowdog0 -
I have two pages ranking for the same keyword.
The index page and the targeted landing page for that keyword. They have different content, title, meta but I am competing with myself for the main keyword in the industry. What is the best way to fix this? 301 the keyword page to the index page?
On-Page Optimization | | Aftermath_SEO0 -
Product sorting and dynamic urls
On our weekly SEOmoz crawls, we get thousands of warnings about overly dynamic URLs as a result of our product sorting options at the top of our category pages. It seems like the ability to sort products by price, name, etc., is nice for the customer. For SEO is this really a problem or can we ignore these warnings?
On-Page Optimization | | teatable0 -
Maintaining semi-related keyword groups
Ahoy! I'm working with a publishing site that has a series of primary topics for free content using a fairly wide keyword, under which we have cluster of associated keywords used in posts. For usability/simplicity some of the neccesarily broader topics have keywords within their cluster that aren't that closely related. We've had success with keeping related keywords and content grouped like this, but I'm not sure how much value to put on this. The issue is that we're writing a new free report (download) that is about "Y". "Y" is in topic category "X". X and Y are loosely related (it made more sense to put Y in X than anywhere else, and adwords/wonderwheel back this up), but there is an obvious disconnect where not everyone searching for X is interested in Y and vice versa. Since the new free report is predominantly about Y, should I go to the effort of using X keyword as a primary keyword since we've got a substantial amount of content in X topic where the two are related and the report will be housed? Or should I just focus on optomizing for Y and not care that it's in the X topic. My feeling is that we'd be better off just focusing on Y, and our general X topic page can continue to be the page focused on ranking for X, even if we normally aim to get an associated free report ranking for other topics' primary keyword. (Blast, that's a rather long and confusing explanation.)
On-Page Optimization | | Alex.Conde0 -
Ranking on page 5 for a 1% difficulty keyword
Hello mozers, I am going crazy over this. I have designed a new site www.smh.cz. The company name / kw is unique (Smolikova Mikulas Hendrich), but it appears on page 5 on Google.
On-Page Optimization | | ilincev
Yahoo and Bing is fine (in top 3 positions). All the on-page factors are ok too.
All the smh.cz pages are indexed on Google. We have done a 301 redirect of two other domains (sm-legal.cz and smm-partners.cz) which were websites for the firms prior to forming a new one. I am scratching my head over what does Google dislike so much. Any thoughts? Can the smh.cz domain - which previously had some dodgy insurance content - be the reason? Your help is much appreciated. Ondrej0