HELP - Site architecture of E-Commerce Mega Menu - Linkjuice flow
-
Hi everyone,
I hope you have a couple of mins to give me your opinion. Ecommerce site has around 2000 products, in english and spanish, and around only 70 hits per day if that.
We have done a lot of optimisation on the site - Page Titles, URL's, Content, H1's, etc.... Everything on page is pretty much under control, except I am starting to realise the site architecture could be harming our SEO efforts.
Once someone arrives on site they are language detected and do a 302 to either domain.com/EN or domain.com/ES depending on their preferred language.
Then on the homepage, we have the big MEGA MENU - and we have
CAT 1
SubCat 1
SubsubCat 1
SubsubCat 2
SubsubCat 3Overall, there are 145 "categories". Plus links to some CMS pages, like Home, Delivery terms, etc...
Each Main Category, contains the products of everything related to that category - so for example:
KITCHENWARE
COOKWARE BAKINWARE
SAUCEPANS BOWLS
FRYING PANSKitchenware contains: ALL PRODUCTS OF SUBCATS BELOW, SO COOKWARE ITEMS, SAUCEPANS, FRYING PANS, BAKINGWARE, etc... plus links to those categories through breadcrumbs and a left hand nav in addition to the mega menu above.
So once the bots hit the site, immediately they have this structure to deal with.
Here is what stats look like:
Domain Authority: 18www.domain.com/EN/
PA: 27
mR: 3.99
mT: 4.90www.domain.com/EN/CAT 1
PA: 15
mR: 3.05
mT: 4.54www.domain.com/EN/CAT 1/SUBCAT1
PA: 15
mR: 3.05
mT: 4.54Product pages themselves - have a PA of 1 and no mR or mT.
I really need some other opinions here - I am thinking of:
- Removing links in Nav menu so it only contains CAT1 and SUBCAT1 but DELETE SUBSUBCATS1 which represent around 80 links
- Remove products within the CAT1 page - eg., the CAT 1 would "tile" graphical links to subcategories, but not display products themselves. So products are only available right at the lowest part of the chain (which will be shortened)
But I am willing to hear any other ideas please - maybe another alternative is to start building links to boost DA and linkjuice?
Thanks all,
Ben
-
Your DA and PA are weak so if I were you I would be selective on what your target. Do some research on keywords you would like to rank for and see what the competition is like for that keyword in the serps and if you have a hope to rank ( you might want to start on mid-long term keywords).
You can also see what pages your currently rank for (page 2 or 3) and if a little improvement with the PA would it get to the front page, then you will know if it worth having a site wide link (via the Nav) to get the max PA to that page from your own site.
But don't for get the people have to use the site so it might not be possible to have every link on the nav to be a landing page.
-
Thanks.
Our landing pages are both - depending on google - we rank for some category pages and rank for products also - the content and keywords are sprinkled without overspamming in the content, so it should make semantic sense what our pages are about.
I think I really need to work on the nav - I think link juice aint flowing.
-
--- your product descriptions are duplicated on other sites and your site has been hit by Panada or the age-old duplicate filter (YES, they are - We are writing new content that is not Manufacturer description copies - e.g., our own unique content - in the meantime, I am META NOINDEX, FOLLOW)
--- you are working on a nascent site that has no links and that nobody is tweeting, liking or citing (Partially correct - we are tweeting and liking it via various social network accounts of our own)
--- you have a bad link profile and have been hit by Panda
(I cant see any "bad links" from unreputable domains - Our link profile is pretty poor and we only have a couple of external references from other websites and nothing too spammy)So, what do you say about the three items above?
Also, those 70 visitors. What are their referring domains, or where are they coming from? We are getting exposure in Google, so mostly traffic coming from Google but not enough
If we were hit by a Google penalty, what would it look like?
-
you have to think what your landing pages are related to the keyword, (are your products your landing page or are your categorys your landing pages) the 145 links on the nav is really splitting your PA of you pages very thin. eg the 27 pa of your homepage is being spread over those 145 pages. Its better to reduce those site wide links to just your landing pages, with clearly always thinking of your users use the site and what works best for them. Think of it like this is a menu with 145 really helping your users?
I'm currently doing the same think for our website, reducing a 222 link nav down is about 20
-
You have certainly done a lot of analysis.
Before considering what you have posted my suspicions for a site that has 2000 products and 70 visits per day are....
--- your product descriptions are duplicated on other sites and your site has been hit by Panada or the age-old duplicate filter
--- you are working on a nascent site that has no links and that nobody is tweeting, liking or citing
--- you have a bad link profile and have been hit by Panda
So, what do you say about the three items above?
Also, those 70 visitors. What are their referring domains, or where are they coming from?
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
-
Back links to pages on our site that don't exist on forums we haven't used with irrelevant product anchor text
Hi, I have a recurring issue that I can't find a reason for. I have a website that has over 7k backlinks that I monitor quite closely. Each month there are additional links on third party forums that have no relevance to the site or subject matter that are as a result toxic. Our clients site is a training site yet these links are appearing on third party sites like http://das-forum-der-musik.de/mineforum/ and have anchor text with "UGG boots for sale" to pages on our url listed as /mensuggboots.html that obviously don't exist. Each month, I try to contact the site owners and then I add them to Google using the disavow tool. Two months later they are gone and then are replaced with new backlinks on a number of different forum websites. Quite random but always relating to UGG boots. There are at least 100 extra links each month. Can anyone suggest why this is happening? Has anyone seen this kind of activity before? Is it possibly black hat SEO being performed by a competitor? I just don't understand why our URL is listed. To be fair, there are other websites linked to using the same terms that aren't ours and are also of a different theme so I don't understand what the "spammer" is trying to achieve. Any help would be appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rufo
KInd Regards
Steve0 -
Help! Is this what is called "cloaking"?
Friend asked me to look at her website. Ran it through screaming frog and BAM, instead of 4 pages i was expecting it returned HUNDREDS. 99.9% of them are for cheap viagra and pharmaceuticals. I asked her if she was selling viagra, which is fine, I don't judge. But she swears she isn't. http://janeflahertyesq.com I ran it through google site:janeflahertyesq.com and sure enough, if you click on some of those, they take you to canadien pharmacys selling half priced blue pills. a) is this cloaking? if not, what is going on? b) more importantly, how do I we get rid of those hundreds of pages / de-indexed She's stumped and scared. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you all in advance and for the work you do.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TeamPandoraBeauty0 -
Why don't I outrank this site?
Hi Mozzers, I'm mystified. Why doesn't our site www.bosphorusyacht.com (ranked 15) outrank this site www.bosphorustour.com (ranked 5 and 6) for the keyword "bosphorus cruise"? Particularly for US based searches. We have far more links, shares, higher DA and PA and more related unique content on topic. Somehow they are even appearing with double listings in this search. Why is this? Am I missing something? Any ideas or suggestions appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | emerald0 -
Subtle On-site Factors That Could Cause a Penalty
It looks like we have the same penalties on more than one ecommerce site. What subtle on-site factors can contribute to non-manual penalty, specifically rankings slowly going down for all short tail keywords? And what does it take to pull yourself out of these penalties?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Is my competitor up to no good? Strange site-explorer results.
I'm researching a competitor using site explorer and the seomoz toolbar and getting some strange results. When you search by the domain name in site explorer you get no results, but the toolbar shows 170K incoming links. http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.augustagreenlawns.com I noticed the top referring page was a strange internal url so I ran that through site explorer and discovered 19 links.. When you put the strange link in a browser, it redirects to the home url;.. At this url the toolbar shows 220 links and semoz shows 19 http://www.augustagreenlawns.com/?xid_78e7f=0f2a64344c8de6bdf2d8cdf8de93ea5c http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.augustagreenlawns.com%2F%3Fxid_78e7f%3D0f2a64344c8de6bdf2d8cdf8de93ea5c What is up with that url? What are they doing? This is a site ranking #1 for my local search term even though he has about 50 pages of almost duplicate content. See link below. I'm really scratching my head here. http://www.augustagreenlawns.com/home.php?all=categories
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dwallner0 -
Google-backed sites' link profiles
Curious what you SEO people think of the link profiles of these (high-ranking) Google-backed UK sites: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?site=www.startupdonut.co.uk http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?site=www.lawdonut.co.uk http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?site=www.marketingdonut.co.uk http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?site=www.itdonut.co.uk http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?site=www.taxdonut.co.uk Each site has between 40k and 50k inlinks counted in OSE. However, there are relatively few linking root domains in each case: 273 for marketingdonut 216 for startupdonut 90 for lawdonut 53 for itdonut 16 for taxdonut Is there something wrong with the OSE data here? Does this imply that the average root domain linking to the taxdonut site does so with 2857 links? The sites have no significant social media stats. The sites are heavily inter-linked. Also linked from the operating business, BHP Information Solutions (tagline "Gain access to SMEs"). Is this what Google would think of as a "natural" link profile? Interestingly, they've managed to secure links on quite a few UK local authority resources pages - generally being the only commercial website on those pages.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seqal0 -
Opinions Wanted: Links Can Get Your Site Penalized?
I'm sure by now a lot of you have had a chance to read the Let's Kill the "Bad Inbound Links Can Get Your Site Penalized" Myth over at SearchEngineJournal. When I initially read this article, I was happy. It was confirming something that I believed, and supporting a stance that SEOmoz has taken time and time again. The idea that bad links can only hurt via loss of link juice when they get devalued, but not from any sort of penalization, is indeed located in many articles across SEOmoz. Then I perused the comments section, and I was shocked and unsettled to see some industry names that I recognized were taking the opposite side of the issue. There seems to be a few different opinions: The SEOmoz opinion that bad links can't hurt except for when they get devalued. The idea that you wouldn't be penalized algorithmically, but a manual penalty is within the realm of possibility. The idea that both manual and algorithmic penalties were a factor. Now, I know that SEOmoz preaches a link building strategy that targets high quality back links, and so if you completely prescribe to the Moz method, you've got nothing to worry about. I don't want to hear those answers here - they're right, but they're missing the point. It would still be prudent to have a correct stance on this issue, and I'm wondering if we have that. What do you guys think? Does anybody have an opinion one way or the other? Does anyone have evidence of it being one way or another? Can we setup some kind of test, rank a keyword for an arbitrary term, and go to town blasting low quality links at it as a proof of concept? I'm curious to hear your responses.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AnthonyMangia0 -
Would linking out to a gambling/casino site, harm my site and the other sites it links out to?
I have been emailed asking if I sell links on one of my sites. The person wants to link out to slotsofvegas[dot]com or similar. Should I be concerned about linking out to this and does it reduce the link value to any of the other sites that the site links out to? Thanks, Mark
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Markus1111