Question regarding eCommerce sites, relative URLs and secuirty certificates
-
We recently installed a new SSL certificate on an ecommerce site. Our IT Director is insisting that all pages on the site must be coded in such a way so that the address bar maintains a green background when a visitor is navigating the site after navigating to a secure page or logging in.
I have worked on many ecommerce sites and never has this been an issue. Amazon does not use the green bar....but they are Amazon.
In order for this to work, he is insisting that all internal URLs be coded as relative instead of absolute.
How bad is this for SEO or does it really not matter that much? How crucial is it for trust and security?
Opinions welcome!
-
Dana,
/blog would be ok in some circumstances, and ../blog in others. It depends on where you are linking from and to. The ".." means the page being linked to is one level up in the hierarchy defined by the path. So if you're linking to www.mysite.com/notblog/filename from www.mysite.com/blog/postname you would use .. while if you are linking to www.mysite.com/blog/filename you would not.
Your developer is probably insisting this because the security certificate doesn't validate on the development or Q&A site, or possibly because you use subdomains. I don't see why an absolute path on the same domain would cause an error.
-
Thanks Streamline! Would this happen because of the ".." before the forward slash? In other words "/blog" would be okay yes?
-
Relative URLs are not inherently bad for SEO, but they oftentimes trip up webmasters if less than 100% of the links on the site are valid. For example, using a link like "../blog" will tell the search engines to go to http://www.mysite.com/blog/blog and then http://www.mysite.com/blog/blog/blog and so on, causing the crawlers to get trapped in an endless loop which is obviously not ideal for SEO. So as long as you are on top of making sure the relative URLs are always valid, then you should be fine.
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
-
Matrix or variant product options question
Hi all,I'm interested in what the community on here think about matrix products aka variant options for products on ecommerce websites from an SEO and ux perspective. I work for a startup in a relatively greenfield industry which we are trying to disrupt. Brand new ecommerce website. The status quo in the sector is to list lots of similar individual products in the same category with the main difference between them being the physical dimensions of the product e.g. Length or height etc Based on this, my view is that we could obtain an advantage over the competition from a search perspective by grouping these products together to display a single page for the main product featuring "options" for the customer to select from on the page. In some instances this could group maybe 20 products together into a single page which would otherwise be individual products and individual pages. This gives us a single page for related keywords and page authority etc (if of course we develop the page in the right way and don't accidentally create crawlable urls when options are selected) This approach might take an ecommerce site with 5000 products down to 2500 products. My view is that this also creates ux benefits enabling customers on the site to find products faster and checkout rather than scrolling through pages and pages of the same items trying to find the right size. So bounce rate lower, better engagement etc all things which contribute to a better page. The challenge I am faced with is convincing everyone that this is the best approach. Everyone in the sector doesn't do it this way so culturally I'm up against it in terms of getting people onboard with the approach. Should I persevere or am I barking up the wrong tree? Thanks in advance for help
Conversion Rate Optimization | | built_bot0 -
Use "Brand Name" or things like "Free Shipping" in Ecommerce Product Title Tags?
Given the current industry best practices and changes to Google algorithms, should I be using "Product name...Brand Name" or something like "Product Name...Free Shipping (or similar)" in my ecommerce title tags? Thanks!
Conversion Rate Optimization | | jeffbstratton0 -
Question regarding on tracking
Hi guys, We are tshirts printing company.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | WayneRooney
We have of course a website and we have around 18k monthly visitors.
We get around 75 daily quotes.
We are not E commerce so we dot sale on the website. We can get all the information from Google analytic regarding to how many quotes we got and from where they came from but we can't know how many quotes was converted. I heard that i can add ref code on the url and then i will see that code in our quotes system and i will know from where that quote arrived.
Another thing that i know i can do is that the system will remember that first url that the visitor enters the site so like that i can know exactly from each url we got the quote and i know that the professional name for this is SESSION. So after all this, the obvious questions here is, Is everything that im saying here is make sense ?
Can i add SESSION to WordPress site ? And how easy is that/or the cost for that ?
For all of you the expert out there, is this the right way to track everything if you are not eCommerce ? Any help are welcome !!0 -
Microsites vs. one site
My client has created a product that he wants to market to two, very different, audiences. The goal is to funnel them through the site and get them to purchase. My question is about the best SEO strategy on how to do this effectively. Since they are distinct audiences with little in common we've recommended building two microsites, and optimizing each with unique content and different keyword focus. I realize it will be harder to optimize two sites rather than one, but it seems to make sense from a user perspective. But once the users goes to a "non-audience specific" page, like any page that is about the product or company and not about the audience, should we build yet a third website that houses the "company/product pages" and channel the conversions there in order to avoid having duplicate content on the two other sites? Or should we put the same "company pages" on both the Audience A and Audience B websites, only vary the text so it doesn't look like duplicate content. Or is the microsite strategy flawed all together? Please keep in mind this is a brand new product and it has national scope. There is no local focus. We will be building their rankings entirely from scratch. I REALLY appreciate any insights you may have. We have been going around and around about this. Thanks
Conversion Rate Optimization | | ptdodge0 -
If your brand name is the same as your URL should you include it in your homepage title tag?
I have always felt that having your brand name in every title tag though-out your website when your URL is your brand name is a waste. The space your brand name takes up could be used for more valuable non-branded keywords. If your brand name is unique, the URL (and content optimized with your brand name) should be enough to have you rank #1 across the board in search results. Though I beleive this I still think it is valuable placing your brand name in the back of your homepage title tag. Example: Full Service Advertising Agency | Your Brand Name Any thoughts why you should or shouldn't do this? Isn't this useful for branded purposes? Doe this help click-though rate? Don't you want your visitors to know our brand at first glance of search results? Another argument I had for doing it was if it weren't important, than why does every search site do this? http://moz.com/ http://searchengineland.com/ http://searchenginewatch.com/ http://www.seroundtable.com/ Thanks for the help!
Conversion Rate Optimization | | EvanC.EGC0 -
How to find average organic traffic growth rate for ecommerce startup?
Happy Friday Everyone, I have a quick question: I am in the process of crunching some numbers to try and figure out an organic traffic forecast for a client. One of the crucial metrics I can't seem to figure out is traffic rate of growth over the next year or so. The reason this is complicated for me is that I have only ever done this sort of thing for an established business before, and had plenty of past organic traffic data to work with. What I am looking for is a source that could give me a reasonable idea of what kind of growth rates I might expect for a startup with practically no data; I would be perfectly happy with a national average for online retail startups. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Conversion Rate Optimization | | G2W0 -
Site Redesign - 2 Target Audiences?
Hey everyone, we are planning a redesign on our website (we have been planning it since Fall last year, but got very busy in the Winter), and some new content / design questions have arisen. Right now, we are a "digital media" agency, and we offer video, design, and marketing services. So we do web videos, motion graphics, websites, seo, really a little bit of everything except for 3d modeling. What we are really trying to sell is the combination of these services (we may create a web video and redesign a groups website, then manage their adwords and marketing campaigns) and become our audiences "Go To" digital media agency. We were toying with the idea of giving visitors the option of picking from one target audience or another when they arrived at the home page, and their experience would be customized to best fit the needs of that particular audience from there on out. For example, on our homepage we were thinking of display our overview and value proposition (which would be the same, no matter which target audience group you were a member of), then asking if the visitor was a "Small Business Owner looking for guidance" or a "Marketing Director looking for outsourcing partners", then based on what option they chose, they'd be directed to a corresponding landing page optimized for converting this audience. We were worrying this may drop our domain or page authority for our home page, since these aren't really keywords that we'd normally be trying to rank for. We understand that it is ideal to have 1 "niche" target audience, but we found that we heavily service both audiences. Any help or suggestions are appreciated, thanks!
Conversion Rate Optimization | | RenderPerfect0 -
Ecommerce Store Sales
I am the webmaster/developer/seo guy for my company's online stores. Of course doing this gets a lot of pressure based on the sales the websites are bringing in. In the past month or so, we've had a somewhat steep dropoff of sales and I've been having an extremely hard time figuring out why. I have researched our visits, and those are staying steady, our ranks have actually gone up for a few of my targeted keywords, the sites are working fine, all statistics seem like everything is normal other than the amount of sales. So the question is: does anyone else here run an Ecommerce store that has run into this kind of problem? Have you found any outside influences from google or other search engines that have had this kind of effect that you wouldn't normally think of looking at? I'm just completely out of ideas for things to check... it may very well be they need to re-price things, but I want to make sure I've done my due diligence to find anything I may be able to fix! Thanks!
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Ask_MMM0