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.
E-Commerce Website Architecture - Cannibalization between Product Categories and Blog Categories?
-
Hi,
I have an e-commerce site that sells laptops.
My main landing pages and category pages are as follows:
"Toshiba Laptops", "Samsung Laptops", etc.We also run a WP blog with industry news.
The posts are divided into categories which are basically as our landing pages.
The posts themselves usually link to the appropriate e-commerce landing page.
For example: a post about a new Samsung Laptop which is categorized in the blog under "Samsung Laptops" will naturally link somewhere inside to the "samsung laptops" ecommerce landing page.Is that good or do the categories on the blog cannibalize my more important e-commerce section landing pages?
Thanks
-
I do often agree with your assessment and perhaps I should have worded it as "you might want to consider" instead of "make sure".
Its because in certain circumstances, having a blog post about something like "5 Reasons the New Toshiba Laptop is Awesome" with a link to your ecommerce page selling the product could be considered a paid link or the post may be seen as an advertorial. Because you sell laptops and you're writing a blog post about laptops that includes a link to the sale of laptops on your own site, there is concern it _migh_t be devalued especially after all the news concerning press release links and advertorials in recent months.
Of course, much of this is conjecture and the more I think about it the more it would seem that the people I've seen concerned about being hit for something like that are people that have been doing other, more sketchy things.
-
No problem. This isn't the clearest example of what I am talking about, but it was the one that I had open in a tab when I got the email notification of your question!
http://www.backcountry.com/3-season-tents
The top of that page has three guides. There are three more at the bottom. Those guides are in a place where customers are more likely to see/use them. That makes sense as they are also great sales tools. Those that open in a modal window for that page also mean that the category page becomes the page that attracts links rather than the blog page.
-
Thanks Mat for the reply.
I didn't quite understand what you meant... Can you provide an example of an e-commerce site you feel that implements it well? (doesn't need to be one related to you).
Thanks
-
Your ending was hilarious:
"hurt you depending on Google guidelines for the given month/week/day"
About nofollow and violating Google:
I think that having a call to action at the end of every post is legit and obvious (for example at the end of "Toshiba Laptops" post having a "Looking for a Toshiba Laptop?" button). It doesn't make sense to me nofollowing it. Doing so will only waste the juice I'm nofollowing - Google stated that no following links that not pass over more juice on the others, it simply wastes it.Look at Hubspot's blog for example, at the end of each post they offer an ebook or something. All of the links are followed.
What do you think?
-
I've always been more of an "if they cannibalized then cross-link" type of person, followed up with a hint of "tweak accordingly". If our blogs are ranking well for something and drawing in more people than the actual product page, it could be that more people are just looking for information and not necessarily purchasing... of course there's the AIDA conversion funnel to consider as well. Why not make sure there is a prominent link/call to action that users can follow once they're done digesting the info so then they can look at the product page and (hopefully) convert? And make sure the link is NoFollow or it could be seen as unnatural and/or inadvertently hurt you depending on Google guidelines for the given month/week/day.
-
Your structure is probably the most common. As you say though, you do risk cannibalising your own results. You could no-index the blog categories.
My preferred approach is to have blog and store more closely integrated. This can allow you to do away with blog category pages entirely, and have those as part of the e-commerce category. Bringing the content closer to the products brings a number of benefits in terms of both SEO and Conversions. It also results in much richer category pages which can be another big win.
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
-
How to prevent development website subdomain from being indexed?
Hello awesome MOZ Community! Our development team uses a sub-domain "dev.example.com" for our SEO clients' websites. This allows changes to be made to the dev site (U/X changes, forms testing, etc.) for client approval and testing. An embarrassing discovery was made. Naturally, when you run a "site:example.com" the "dev.example.com" is being indexed. We don't want our clients websites to get penalized or lose killer SERPs because of duplicate content. The solution that is being implemented is to edit the robots.txt file and block the dev site from being indexed by search engines. My questions is, does anyone in the MOZ Community disagree with this solution? Can you recommend another solution? Would you advise against using the sub-domain "dev." for live and ongoing development websites? Thanks!
Web Design | | SproutDigital0 -
Moving to new site. Should I take old blog posts with me?
Our company website has needed a complete overhaul for some time now and the new one is almost ready to go live. We also have a separate "news" site that is houses around 800 blog posts and news items. (That news site will be thrown away because it's on a completely different domain and causes confusion.) So we have a main site with about 100 decent blog posts and a separate news site with 800 poor posts. I plan on bringing all the main site blog posts over to the new site (both WordPress), but my question is whether or not to bring over the news site posts? All, handful, none? Another issue is the news site doesn't have Google Analytics, so I'm not sure if any posts actually generate traffic, but I can from the main site we do get some referrals from it. As far as quality of content goes, it's poor. Not sure who wrote it all, but it's mainly text press releases that aren't very interesting. Is it worth bringing over for SEO purposes or simply delete the site and create a mass redirect so all of those pages will direct to the new website's blog page? Any help is greatly appreciated.
Web Design | | codyfrew0 -
Website Home page suddenly disappeared after changing Hosting
HI All, My site was ranking very well and was in 1st page of google for most of my keywords. Last week we did some update to the site and moved it to new hosting and from then onwards I dont see my site home page in Google ranking . My Website Name is : royalevents.com.au. We used to be in 1st of Google for keywords like wedding Mandaps, Indian Wedding Mandaps etc, Would be great if some one helps us to figure out whats gone wrong .. I also did Webmaster Fetch as Google but nothing happened. Thanks
Web Design | | Verve-Innovation0 -
Magento Category H1 Tags
I am currently using magento and have all titles labeled correctly. I have made a H1 tag for the main page which works fine. Each product title becomes and H1 tag, which again is fine. However my category pages are missing H1 tags. If I manually code an H1 tag, then there becomes 2 H1 tags. It is using my category name then my manual H1 tag. I don't want it to use my category name because it is shortened to fit on my navigation bar.
Web Design | | nchachula
Ex. www.mydomain.com/tshirts/short-sleeve
In this example the subcategory title is short sleeve. When using MOZ tool on frontend it shows NO H1 tag or the title becomes H1 tag "short sleeve" however I want the H1 to actually be "short sleeve tshirts"
If I manually add an H1 tag to description on category page it adds both the title AND the H1 tag I enter.0 -
Reasons Why Our Website Pages Randomly Loads Without Content
I know this is not a marketing question but this community is very dev savvy so I'm hoping someone can help me. At random times we're finding that our website pages load without the main body content. The header, footer and navigation loads just fine. If you refresh, it's fine but that's not a solution. Happens on Chrome, IE and Firefox, testing with multiple browser versions Happens across various page types - but seems to be only the main content section/container Happens while on the company network, as well as externally Happens after deleting cookies, temporary internet files and restarting computer We are using a CMS that is virtually unheard of - Bridgeline/Iapps Codebase is .net Our IT/Dev group keeps pushing back, blaming it on cookies or Chrome plugins because they apparently are unable to "recreate the problem". This has been going on for months and it's a terrible experience for the user to have. It's also not great when landing PPC visitors on pages that load with no content. If anyone has ideas as to why this may be happening I would really appreciate it. I'm not sure if links are allowed, by today the issue happened on this page serversdirect.com/dm/geek-biz Linking to an image example below knEUzqd
Web Design | | CliqStudios0 -
Duplicate content on websites for multiple countries
I have a client who has a website for their U.S. based customers. They are currently adding a Canadian dealer and would like a second website with much of the same info as their current website, but with Canadian contact info etc. What is the best way to do this without creating duplicate content that will get us penalized? If we create a website at ABCcompany.com and ABCCompany.ca or something like that, will that get us around the duplicate content penalty?
Web Design | | InvoqMarketing0 -
Does having a Blog link in the top level navigation provide any better SEO value, or would having it in a footer or top navigation work just as good?
Trying to decide on whether placing a link to the blog in our top level navigation would have a better SEO value than just placing it in top or footer navigation. I have an ecommerce site.
Web Design | | RPD0 -
Site-wide footer links or single "website credits" page?
I see that you have already answered this question before back in 2007 (http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/2163), but wanted to ask your current opinion on the same question: Should I add a site-wide footer link to my client websites pointing to my website, or should I create a "website credits" page on my clients site, add this to the footer and then link from within this page out to my website?
Web Design | | eseyo0