Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
SEO for Online Auto Parts Store
-
I'm currently doing an audit for an online auto parts store and am having a hard time wrapping my head around their duplicate content issue. The current set up is this:
- The catalogue starts with the user selecting their year of vehicle
- They then choose their brand (so each of the year pages have listed every single brand of car, creating duplicate content)
- They then choose their model of car and then the engine
- And then this takes them to a page listing every type/category of product they sell (so each and every model type/engine size has the exact same content!) This is amounting to literally thousands of pages being seen as duplicates
It's a giant mess. Is using rel=canonical the best thing to do? I'm having a hard time seeing a logical way of structuring the site to avoid this issue.
Anyone have any ideas?
-
First, is this content dynamic? Depending on how the user progresses through these choices a search engine may not even see this information.
Second, as long as those aren't the pages you are trying to rank I can't see them actually having that big of an impact (if any) on your overall SEO. There is a difference between having pages that have the same content, and having pages that are duplicate content.
Rel canonical would be another way to save your skin, and making sure that the choices themselves are no-follow links (as long as there is some other method to get to the deeper pages).
Personally for the sake of SEO and user experience (which is far more important) I'd talk to the company about creating a dynamic selection wizard that could be a popup and once the user makes all their choices brings them to the right HTML page.
The HTML pages would be open, crawl-able, structured and sitemapped and the wizard would by a dynamic widget loaded in from a page that was robots disallowed. Helping both the human and spider experience - just my two cents!
Best of luck!
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
-
Seeking SEO contractor
I would like to hire an SEO contractor to assist with some technical/SEO issues on our site (Schema, etc). Can anyone make a recommendation? I am looking to work with a small company. Thank you in advance for any referrals!
On-Page Optimization | | JulieALS1 -
When Google rewrites a title tag, do you get the SEO impact for the original version?
Let's say you're writing a homepage title tag like this: KEYWORD | BRAND and Google rewrites it as BRAND | KEYWORD From Moz and best practices, we believe that keywords closer to the beginning of a title tag may have more impact on search rankings. So, when Google rewrites the title tag, do you get the impact you would have made with the keyword being closer to the front? Or, does Google give you the impact you would have received with the keyword being at the end?
On-Page Optimization | | Kevin_P0 -
Is NitroPack plugin Black Hat SEO for speed optimization
We are getting ready to launch our redesigned WP site and were considering using NitroPack performance optimization plugin, until some of our developers started ringing the alarm. Here is what some in the SEO community are saying about the tool. The rendering of the website made with the NitroPack plugin in the Page Metric Test Tools is based entirely on the inline CSS and JS in the HTML file without taking into account additional numerous CSS or JS files loaded on the page. As a result, the final metric score does not include CSS and JavaScript files evaluation and parsing. So what they are saying is that a lot of websites with the NitroPack plugin never become interactive in the Page Metric Tools because all interactivity is derived from JavaScript and CSS execution. So, their "Time to Interactive" and "Speed Index" should be reported as equal to infinity. Would Google consider this Black Hat SEO and start serving manual actions to sites using NitroPack? We are not ready to lose our hard-earned Google ranking. Please, let me know your thoughts on the plugin. Is it simply JS and CSS "lazy loading" that magically offers the first real-world implementation that works magic and yields fantastic results, or is it truly a Black Hat attempt at cheating Google PageSpeed Insights numbers? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | opiates0 -
Do Blog Tags affect SEO at all anymore?
We're trying to standardize the use of tags on our site amongst writers/editors, and I'm trying to come up a list of tags they can choose from to tag posts with - and telling them to use no more than 10 (absolute maximum) per post. We are also in the process of migrating to a new CMS, and have 8 defined categories that will all have their own landing page within our "News" section. TLDR: Do blog tags have any impact on SEO anymore? Are they solely meant to help users find articles related on popular topics, or does creating a tag for a popular topic help to improve organic visibility? Full Question: With the tag standardization, I want to make sure we're creating the most useful and effective tags; and the UX/SEO sides of my brain are conflicted. To my understanding, creating a tag about a high volume topic in an industry helps establish the website's relevance to Google/other search engines about that topic and improves overall relevance; but the tag feed page (ex: http://freshome.com/tag/home-protection/) isn't really meant for organic search visibility. So my other question is, is it worth it to noindex the tag pages in the robots.txt? Will that affect any benefit to increased relevance for Google (if there is any)? I'm interested to hear others' thoughts and suggestions. Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | davidkaralisjr0 -
Harms of hidden categories on SEO
On our website we have some invisible/hidden categories on our site. Can anyone advise whether these are harmful in terms of SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | CostumeD0 -
How does a collapsed section affect on page SEO?
A client recently asked me whether a tabbed collapsed section of text that is expanded (i.e. revealed) when clicked, is an OK thing to do without negatively effecting SEO. I told him that for starters, he may want to rethink why he would want to hide the text in the first place (this is not an FAQ type scenario). The reason has to do with the aesthetic of the page. Anyway, aesthetic aside, any thoughts on whether a collapsed (hidden from view) negatively affects on-page SEO? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | stephanwb
Stephan0 -
Are blank Product Review pages bad for SEO?
Hi there, I'm running a new e-commerce site (BoatOutfitters.com) and have a question about our product review pages. On our current campaign, we have a lot of duplicate page content errors. When we export the data, it's almost all blank product review pages (since we are new, we don't have that many product reviews yet). Our product reviews aren't run through javascript, so we originally did not add them to a robots.txt file - however, I'm now wondering if it's worse to have all of these duplicate blank pages, or is it not affecting our SEO at all? Should we just wait until these products have reviews which will benefit our SEO and then they won't be considered "duplicate pages" - right? Sorry if this has been answered before - new here at SEO Moz and just looking for some help. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | BoatOutfitters0 -
Does having a "+" in a URL hurt SEO? Would much value be gained changing it to a hyphen?
There's a site that contains "+" signs in the URL in order to call different information for the content on the page. Would it be better to change those to hyphens (-), or not that much value will be gained, so leave them as is? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | MitchellStoker0