Does my overly dynamic website hurt my SEO?
-
I have heard from a couple of people that my overly dynamic URL's hurt my SEO tremendously. Can anyone verify that? Of course my provider says it doesn't matter but I take what they say with a grain of salt.
Another thing, my web crawls show a TON of errors for duplicate page title and overly dynamic url and duplicate page content. How big of a deal is this?
-
I will gladly offer a few tips on your site, but first I will make a couple observations. It sounds like you are just getting started with SEO so I would strongly suggest reading the beginner's guide to SEO from start to finish. Even if you are experienced with SEO it can be a great refresher.
For your site and business, determine your niche. What makes your site different from the thousands of other sites which sell clothing? Use your niche to determine your keywords. Unless you have a massive budget, you will not be able to compete nationally with other websites, but you can do well with longtail keywords.
The below is a list of a few items I would change with your site. Others may feel differently so please be clear these are my opinions:
-
The meta description for your product pages should be unique. The page I examined had the same description as your home page.
-
If you have more information about your company, expand your About Us page. Information such as an address, pictures and profiles of key employees, etc. give consumers confidence in your site.
-
Consider adding badges from companies like TRUSTe, Verisign, McAfee and the BBB. These badges offer shoppers a measure of comfort and confidence in your site.
-
I didn't go through your checkout but if you do not offer Google Checkout, then add it. It's Google's search engine you wish to rank in, and adding their checkout makes your results stand out.
-
remove your meta keywords tag. It offers no benefit.
-
I looked at a blog page: http://www.nvclothing.com/blog. The images at the top are not linked. What if I like what I see and wish to buy it? By linking the image you allow your viewers to be impulsive. Otherwise your visitor needs to want the product enough to search your site.
-
I couldn't find a Home button. Once I leave the home page, how do I get back? Sure I can type in the URL or use the Back button, but I would recommend adding a Home link somewhere.
There were numerous good things I noticed. Your pages have unique Title tags, you offer social sharing buttons right next to your products, and have alt tags on your images.
Good luck.
-
-
Thanks for your feedback. I found the meta tag problem and am fixing it now. I have just recently begun to actively work on my website. If you don't mind, would you please point out areas in which you believe need the most improvement on my site?
I know I don't rank very well on many keywords that I care about but don't really know what to do about it.
thanks in advance.
-
The meta description issue was on your home page.
With respect to the comment "you will never experience any real growth", can you share the reasoning offered? What exactly is wrong with your current software?
That broad statement seems like something a person who is selling software would say to encourage you to buy their product.
I do see SEO opportunities on your site which you are working on correcting. I am also confident if you put time, money and effort into your site you could improve it.
-
Thank you for the feedback. I will look into the meta description issue. can you tell me what page you see that on?
I'll also look into the canonical tag.
I've been told I'll never experience any real growth with my current platform/provider. Is this true?
-
I will agree with Cody and William but offer a bit more detail.
I took a look at your site and yes, your dynamic URLs are pretty ugly.
http://www.nvclothing.com/product.asp?lt=c&catid=13039&sec=women&pfid=NVC02369
There is nothing wrong with having a dynamic URL at all. It would perform a lot better from a SEO perspective if it was displayed in a readable format.
Do my overly dynamic URL's hurt my SEO?
No. Overly dynamic URLs do not hurt SEO. But, your dynamic URLs are missing a significant opportunity to help SEO. By using readable URLs search engines can factor in the key words from your URL as a factor in determining your rank. Also, people feel more comfortable clicking on a URL that clearly indicates what the page will show.
How big of a deal is duplicate page titles and duplicate page content?
It's something you want to fix. The duplicate page issue can be addressed with adding the canonical tag to your pages. There is a strong chance that will fix your duplicate page title issue as well.
If you do not fix this issue, you may have the wrong pages indexed, and your link value may not flow to the correct page. Basically, you wont rank as well in search results.
Something else I noticed while on your site. You use the meta description tag twice. You should eliminate one of them.
-
Depends on how the URL is being written. URL names can get ugly with dynamic writing if they're not cleaned up with URL rewriting methods.
This is something that can have a fairly significant effect on your SEO. You may want to look into configuring a URL rewriting method to write pretty URLs.
Here are a couple of articles to get you started.
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/using-mod-rewrite-to-convert-dynamic-urls-to-seo-friendly-urls
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls-the-best-practice-for-seo-is-still-clear
-
The difference between something like:
http://www.nvclothing.com/product.asp?lt=c&catid=17763&sec=women&pfid=NVC02304
And what you could do with something like:
http://www.nvclothing.com/wildfox-couture-red-sparkle-heart-long-sleeve-tee
Is pretty significant. Keywords in the url are tremendously valuable and it's worth it to get a developer that is familiar with url rewrite for ecommerce sites like yours.
As far as the duplicate titles and content, big deal. Bear in mind, that you are not going to face any penalties, but you're missing out on performing as best you can and ranking for searches you should be, because the website is not following best practices by having unique content and titles for each and every page.
It's a bit of work, but totally worth the effort.
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 long does Google indexes the website after algorithm update?
I've noticed that the page ranks for some queries were improved unexpectedly, without any actions from my side. Is it possible that this improvement is connected with with Google algorithm update Sep, 4-5?
Algorithm Updates | | AurigaPR0 -
Does using non-https links (not pages) impact or penalise the website rankings?
Hi community, We have couple of pages where we we have given non-https (http) hyperlinks by mistake. They will redirect to http links anyway. Does using these http links on page hurt any rankings? Thansk
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
SEO Audit after Penguin 2.1 what are you guys seeing? this is my thougts
We have looked at around 2000 sites since Penguin 2.1 launched a few weeks back. These include our customers and their own competitors site. We are going through all the data which is obviously going to take some time. Hopefully we will publish a report on our findings as we are happy to share. What I currently see in my early analysis is Roughly 70% of sites tested have 0% exact match Anchor Text for their money keywords. The other 30% have less than 5% exact match Anchor Text. The quality of the links is often still poor to the sites ranking on page 1. The content surrounding the links is only about 10-15% of the time related to the money keywords. The loading time of the sites ranking seems to not matter, we encountered a lot of slow sites. Design and usability of the site was not important. We are not seeing much impact via Social media, a lot of these sites are small business Less than 10% of sites on page 1 had a Google+ account More than 40% of page 1 sites had Facebook profiles. More than 80% of the sites ranking on page 1 had less than 100 links to the landing page that ranked What are your opinions of helping to recover if hit by the above??? Q) If you have too high an anchor text percentage and have been hit or may get hit in the future would you. a) create some more high quality links with more varied anchor text, ie Click here, brand name etc b) not create any more links just remove the links you have to dilute the anchor text c) change the anchor text on links you are able to These figures are a work in progress so data will change just wanting to share our early findings and try to get a good conversation going. What are you guys seeing?
Algorithm Updates | | tempowebdesign0 -
Does adding lots of new content on a site at one time actually hurt you?
When speaking with a client today, he made the comment that he didn't want all of the new content we'd been working to be added to the site all at once for fear that he would get penalized for flooding the site with new content. I don't have any strong data to confirm or refute the claim, is there any truth to it?
Algorithm Updates | | JordanRussell0 -
What is the best way to organize a catergory for SEO purpsoes?
I work for a organic vitamin and supplement company and we are looking to rank for our categories by making more specific categories. For example we are going to try to add under the category "vitamin d" some smaller more relevant (longer-tail) categories like "spray vitamin d" and "vegan vitamin d" and try to rank instead for these searches and also searches containing words that we already have more authority from Google like "natural" or "organic". I know that putting the product pages a level deeper will only hurt us so I want to avoid that but I'm wondering if anyone has some advice on how to organize categories for longer tail keywords that we actually have a chance to rank for. Any help to figure this out would be greatly appreciated. Here is our page as it is currently, like I said we want to create sub categories that are effective for SEO, but also make searching and navigating the site easier. http://www.mynaturalmarket.com/Vitamin-D.html Thanks, ThatKwameGuy
Algorithm Updates | | ThatKwameGuy1 -
Videos increase ranking of products in SERPS from Ecommerce Website
Just noticed something I've never seen before..and I just wanted to see if anyone else experienced this. I work for a 15000+ item eccommerce website, and today I noticed that on a few brand searches, several individual product pages were coming up. This is actually unusual because most of our individual item pages (including these) aren't ranked well enough to show up well in a brand search (and don't try to target brand terms either), but a correlation here was that both items contained videos referenced within. These were not videos hosted on our YouTube brand page either..these were videos done by separate manufacturers - one was hosted on their site, one on ours. Google actually pulled the snapshot of the video to the SERP as well... even though it was embedded within other product copy. Has anyone else noticed any preferential treatment given to effectively random items on your eCommerce website because it was augmented by video? I can assure you there was nothing otherwise unique about these products and they're not really that sought after. Neither item or url was new, and neither were the videos within. Also, this was a Universal Google search, not one for videos. (Sorry, I'm not allowed to reference directly). Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | Blenny0 -
Why bing is not indexing our website?
We are up almost a six month already, google indexed 46,900 pages. We have decent traffic and a lot of real external links to us. No single page has been indexed by bing or yahoo. I have submitted sitemap to bing's webmaster tool two weeks ago and still it is in Pending stage. here is our address: www.showme.com and here is site map: http://www.showme.com/sitemapxml.php What can be the reason of that? Thanks for your help. Karen Bdoyan
Algorithm Updates | | showme0 -
TOP 3-5 SEO Blogs
I am wondering if you can help me start with the top three to five SEO blogs. I have been really enjoying and getting into learning more about SEO and it is becoming really fun as it becomes less overwhelming. A few days ago there was a question about great SEO blogs. And everyone provided a great list. I bookmarked all of them, but in reality I won't be able to go through them all and really get what is being presented. My question is what would be the best 3-5 to start with? Eventually I will go through them all but experience can help me get on the right track. Thanks for the suggestions
Algorithm Updates | | fertilityhealth0