What counts as a "deeper level" in SEO?
-
Hi,
I am trying to make our site more crawlable and get link juice to the "bottom pages" in an ecommerce site.
Currently, our site has a big mega menu - and we have:
Home >
CAT 1
SUBCAT 1
SUBSUBCAT 1
PRODUCTOur URL Structure looks:
www.domain.com/cat1/subcat1/subsubcat1/ and here are the links to the products but the URL's look like: www.domain.com/product.htmlObviously the ideal thing would be to cut out one of the CATEGORIES. But I may be unable to do that in the short term - so I was wondering if by taking CAT1 out of the equation - e.g., just make it a static item that allows the drop down menu to work, but no page for it -
Does that cut out a level?
Thanks,
Ben
-
Thanks for that - I think what I am trying to do is somehow cut the linkjuice dilution - my DA is weak and the mega menu contains around 150 links with all the cats / subcats... so my link juice is diluted all over the place.
We have 1750 products but only 50 hits per day -
Any suggestions?
www.eHYPHENcocinasplusDOTcom.
Thanks
-
As tom suggests, it won't be easy. I've a number of clients with this kind of multi-category set up (one is 5 layers deep!) and its really hard to get juice down to those levels consistently.
For example if you've a product 2 layers deep it seems to be twice as easy for it to gain traction as if it were 4 layers down. This isn't to say it can't be done, it can, but put simply it means you have to really push links at it externally and in social.
Also it sounds like you would benefit from splitting your sitemap by category to that you can focus some attention within sitemaps to these pages rather than have it be one of ten thousand entries.
-
I agree with Tom here.
Never go beyond the third level. We use TIER 0 till Tier 3 in our case for most websites.
Hopes this helps some
regards
Jarno
-
The key thing to consider here is whether or not that product page is accessible in any other way.
Take the URL appearance out of the equation and look for the quickest route to navigate to that product page. If it takes more than 3 steps to get to, you can think of it as a "deep page" and it may take longer to crawl.
Removing a category would help, but only if that is reflected in the navigation on the site and not just the URL appearance.
Of course, if a product page has a lot of external links going towards it and is featured prominantely in an XML sitemap, it negates the worry of it being not crawled as often to a degree. Ideally, you want your core landing pages or product pages as close to the root domain as possible (1 or 2 steps). 3 is usually the maximum for best practice, but with enough links and social shares Google will recognise it as an important page in its own right and will frequently recrawl it.
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
-
SEO on Jobs sites: how to deal with expired listings with "Google for Jobs" around
Dear community, When dealing with expired job offers on jobs sites from a SEO perspective, most practitioners recommend to implement 301 redirects to category pages in order to keep the positive ranking signals of incoming links. Is it necessary to rethink this recommendation with "Google for Jobs" is around? Google's recommendations on how to handle expired job postings does not include 301 redirects. "To remove a job posting that is no longer available: Remove the job posting from your sitemap. Do one of the following: Note: Do NOT just add a message to the page indicating that the job has expired without also doing one of the following actions to remove the job posting from your sitemap. Remove the JobPosting markup from the page. Remove the page entirely (so that requesting it returns a 404 status code). Add a noindex meta tag to the page." Will implementing 301 redirects the chances to appear in "Google for Jobs"? What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grnjbs07175 -
Best Practices for Creating Back Links from "Thought Leader" Content
What is the best way to use articles from a "thought leader" to build high-quality links to my website? I have heard that it is possible to pay bloggers to post business articles that link back to a website. That assuming these blogs have domain authority this is a good technique to improve ranking. Is this in fact true, and if so where would I find blogs to post our content. The purpose would be to promote real estate brokerage website. Any suggestions? Is this possible, advisable, best use of quality content? Alternatively, where else can we post engaging content to create links back to our site? Social media? The nature of the content would be such topics as how to find the best value in Manhattan office of loft space rentals, etcera. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Why is hosting good for SEO?
I've heard a few people mention this now. I have seen hosting packages range from £5 to £1000 per month, and I understand that each comes with their own amounts of storage space, bandwidth and all. Now I understand that page speed is important to SEO and the type of hosting will dictate your page speed, but other than this why is hosting important to SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Redirect old "not found" url (at http) to new corresponding page (now at https)
My least favorite part of SEO 😉 I'm trying to redirect an old url that no longer exists to our new website that is built with https. The old url: http://www.thinworks.com/palm-beach-gardens-team/ New url: https://www.thinworks.com/palm-beach-gardens/ This isn't working with my standard process of the quick redirection plugin in WP or through htaccess because the old site url is at http and not https. Any help would be much appreciated! How do I accomplish this, where do I do it and what's the code I'd use? Thank you Moz community! Ricky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SUCCESSagency0 -
Geotargeting SEO
Hi, We are and SEO company based in Scotland and have taken on a project where the client works in the UK but has distribution in mainland Europe and the US. He currently is working off 3 websites targeted at each area Uk, US and Mainland Europe We are going to rebuild one site and have each area on the site, however we are unsure if sub folders or sub domains would work better. My personal opinion is that sub domains would be better, but I dont have information to back this Can anyone advise? Any advice on geotargeting SEO also would be appreciated! Many Thanks Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trickcreative0 -
Our quilting site was hit by Panda/Penguin...should we start a second "traffic" site?
I built a website for my wife who is a quilter called LearnHowToMakeQuilts.com. However, it has been hit by Panda or Penguin (I’m not quite sure) and am scared to tell her to go ahead and keep building the site up. She really wants to post on her blog on Learnhowtomakequilts.com, but I’m afraid it will be in vain for Google’s search engine. Yahoo and Bing still rank well. I don’t want her to produce good content that will never rank well if the whole site is penalized in some way. I’ve overly optimized in linking strongly to the keywords “how to make a quilt” for our main keyword, mainly to the home page and I think that is one of the main reasons we are incurring some kind of penalty. First main question: From looking at the attached Google Analytics image, does anyone know if it was Panda or Penguin that we were “hit” by? And, what can be done about it? (We originally wanted to build a nice content website, but were lured in by a get rich quick personality to rather make a “squeeze page” for the Home page and force all your people through that page to get to the really good content. Thus, our avenge time on site per person is terrible and Pages per Visit is low at: 1.2. We really want to try to improve it some day. She has a local business website, Customcarequilts.com that did not get hit. Second question: Should we start a second site rather than invest the time in trying to repair the damage from my bad link building and article marketing? We do need to keep the site up and running because it has her online quilting course for beginner quilters to learn how to quilt their first quilt. We host the videos through Amazon S3 and were selling at least one course every other day. But now that the Google drop has hit, we are lucky to sell one quilting course per month. So, if we start a second site we can use that to build as a big content site that we can use to introduce people to learnhowtomakequilts.com that has Martha’s quilting course. So, should we go ahead and start a new fresh site rather than to repair the damage done by my bad over optimizing? (We’ve already picked out a great website name that would work really well with her personal facebook page.) Or, here’s a second option, which is to use her local business website: customcarequilts.com. She created it in 2003 and has had it ever since. It is only PR 1. Would this be an option? Anyway I’m looking for guidance on whether we should pursue repairing the damage and whether we should start a second fresh site or use an existing site to create new content (for getting new quilters to eventually purchase her course). Brad & Martha Novacek rnUXcWd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BradNovi0 -
Facebook "lockout"
I'm not sure what the correct term is, but I've visited websites that require me to like page 1 of an article, to view page 2. Little annoying but fair enough, they wrote the content, I clearly find it of value as I want page 2. I run a download website, with user generated content. We used to only allow downloads to members, this resulted in 5,000+ new signups per day and a massive userbase. We now allow guests to download content, the majority are freeloaders, not even a thank you to the artist. I am about to employ a system for guests, that forces them to like, tweet or G+ the download, for it to begin. If they don't, no download. Are there any SEO considerations here? The page this will be implemented on, isn't a crawlable page. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo-wanna-bs0