What to do with Redirects

[joseph.chambers]

I need some advise. I am remapping the eCommerce Categories to achieve a few goals:

• Have better landing pages - for a better user experience.
• I've been a bad boy - some crappy links. Panda did hurt.
• I've added layered navigation and faceted search.

In order to achieve a better user experience I've had a to break up the old categories. For example, when you landed on these pages - you had to choose between different sets of gender and medal type.

Model Name

• Mens Gold
• Mens Stainless
• Ladies Two Tone
• Mid-Size Yellow Gold

Do you see? So - here is what I am doing.. I created a better menu to be a lot more specific for people who land on other pages to get there. Now they can goto mens model name and select stainless or whatever, if they want, to dig in there or use the layered navigation. What we also did is now you can even view 20 products on these pages too as well as see the layered navigation to filter.

Now this is my question - I'm creating a list of these old categories and my plan is to 302 them to the search page with the faceted search. I have my search page globally, noindex, nofollow - is this the best strategy? How would you do it?

Apart from Redirects - what have you , other SEOs, learned about layered navigation and faceted search - where can it cause issues for SEO?

[Everett]

Thanks Josheph, I'm glad you liked it.

Have you looked into Google Site Search?

http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/products/gss.html

You can test out the search on your site from that URL. If your blog is on a subdomain you have to test http://yourdomain.com instead of http://www.yourdomain.com.

I think Endeca allows you to do this, but you should make sure they show you some live examples first. I looked for one but didn't find it.

Whatever Crutchfield is doing seems to work, though it's not exactly what you're asking for. If you use the search field from the Research tab you get content. If you use the search field from the Shop tab you get products:

http://www.crutchfield.com/learnsearch/installing_car_speakers.html

Good luck!

[joseph.chambers]

I just realized who you we're! I really enjoyed your eCommerce presentation you did here. It had me GLUED and analyzing every word you said.

You Sir - influenced the new site I just launched today. For example, all my product urls do have: /product/ categories are prefixed with /category/

How would you approach the search on eCommerce sites that have good pages and blog posts on the same search results? Who have you seen "do it right?" - examples?

[Everett]

Hello Joseph,

You are very welcome. It sounds like you are well educated on your options and have put a lot of thought into this. Perhaps you are correct that we won't be able to understand the particular nuances of the situation without viewing the site ourselves. I think the plan you have outlined sounds like a good one and you are doing all of the right things as far as I can tell without seeing the site.

Good luck!

[joseph.chambers]

Hello,

I have been through your reply a few times and I'm going to give some feedback here. I really wanted to shake your hand on your reply. I know you spent some time replying to it and giving it some thought. Thank you sir. Lets get to it.

You: it may be cheaper and faster to just start on a new domain.

Me: Yes, but thats not really possible. We have a million bucks a month in revenue streams.. not all from google but we're a big company. The name change would maybe be better for low quality sites that that does dropshipping - or affiliate stuff.. we have a huge brand following.

You: Remove all of the bad links that you can, and disavow the rest.

Me: Yes - I signed up for link detox http://www.linkdetox.com - and exported all the low quality pages and imported into LinkAssistent to start the outreach.

You: Perhaps building a better quality site will be all you need.

Me: Yes, that's exactly right and we actually just went live today with the new site. Though it still needs work, user metrics, engagement improvement has been impressive.

You: I would block the internal search result pages from being indexed using the robots.txt file

Me: Yes, I have done that.

You: regarding faceted navigation, it is often a great user experience, but can wreak havoc on your site's SEO strategy.

Me: I have not read any of those until today and I will just AJAX the layered navigation all together. Currently, it does add parameters to the URL but I have those noindex, followed and I went into webmaster tools and defined what they are in the crawl-url-parameters. This is how I set it up:

• Does this parameter change page content seen by the user? - Yes: Changed, Reorders, or Narrows page content.
• How does this parameter affect page content? - Narrows
• Which URLs with this parameter should Googlebot crawl? - No URLs

I approached this like this: First, I need to approve the user experience and get what I can done with SEO but later, I can fix all the SEO problems. For example, I know I could have used AJAX for the layered navigation but I was thinking - lets get it working and populated. It took 5 minutes of my time to use this tool: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/crawl-url-parameters which is 2010 - when Rand did the whiteboard friday, this tool didn't exist.

You: I've heard of temporary escapes via redirects, but the site usually ends up in the same trouble again once the link graph has been updated.

Me: I'll let you know how it goes but my goal was to get the people who did have it bookmarked, or from old good links that would bring in traffic.. at least they would find what they we're searching for while I find the time to clean up bad links. Since I was restructuring the keyword strategy to be more target ( mens, ladies ) I needed to be able to do something with them. I felt, that the search results would be the best placefor them on our site, as it is right now.

What I have been doing today:

• We have a lot of similar products. So I am going through them and adding the rel=canonical or changing the content, url, etc, etc.
• Looking for a solution to getting a view all canonical in place on paginated results.
• Fixing small bugs.
• Thinking about how I can make the search better. For example, we are a eCommerce site but we also have a great blog with good, well written content. Now, how can I offer both of them in the search results as a good user experience.

I'm going to mark your post as a good answer because, I'm realizing that my case, my be different because of the architecture change and without giving a link to the site so you can really see - no ones maybe, going to be able to "grasp" it.

[Everett]

Hello Joseph,

If you're going to throw your links away rather than fix them and plan to start fresh with new pages that don't have any links at all - it may be cheaper and faster to just start on a new domain. This all depends on how much branding you have into the old one, but if you want to distance yourself from bad links and build a better site it might be a good time to start over.

Assuming you don't want to start over, please don't expect that the 302 redirect of those pages to the search pages are going to get you out of a link-based penalty. The bad links are still going into your domain, and if you've been affected by Penguin there are only two things that I know of to help in the long-term: 1. Remove all of the bad links that you can, and disavow the rest. 2. Buy a new domain and start over, paying more attention to Google's guidelines this time.

I've heard of temporary escapes via redirects, but the site usually ends up in the same trouble again once the link graph has been updated.

You said Panda above, but Panda didn't have to do with bad links. If you were affected by Panda you probably have some thin/duplicate content and user experience issues to deal with. Perhaps building a better quality site will be all you need, assuming you don't have a link-based penalty, and weren't affected by Penguin.

I would block the internal search result pages from being indexed using the robots.txt file, as recommended by Google here under Technical Guidelines:

"Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines."

Also, regarding faceted navigation, it is often a great user experience, but can wreak havoc on your site's SEO strategy. Make sure to read up on how to properly implement it if you haven't already. Here are some links:

• Building Faceted Navigation That Doesn't Suck
• Faceted Navigation Whiteboard Friday
• Solving Duplicate Content Issues Arising from Faceted Navigation

You will quickly find that there are lots of different ways to deal with faceted navigation's affected on your SEO strategy, and will have to decide which method/s are right for you.

[joseph.chambers]

Yea - I know what 302 means - I just don't want to pass link juice to the search page and if there is a penalty on those older pages. I dont know what else to do with them and for example, if the page was about red apples, then I will redirect it to ?s=red+apples - this page does have a faceted search.

Currently, if they landed on /category/model-name/ they would have to choose where to go. Do I want a gender-metel-type

I went after larger, _non-targeted _keywords before. Categories reflected that. I feel that the search page, would be a better user experience for the older categories. Am I right? I dont know what else to do with them.. What would you do? I dont want to keep them and some of them have some real bad links which will be cleaned up in time, but for now - the new categories, new pages, I feel, is a good step forward with a completely new design, layered navigation and faceted search.. I am building a better site.

[WesleySmits]

302 means a temporary redirect. If you want to permanently redirect the old URL's to the new URL's.
Why would you want to redirect to the search page? That doesn't seem to be the most relevant page for the redirect?