How do we get search engine bots to the item detail pages?
-
The problem we have is that we have lots of inventory pages. These inventory pages have a bunch of links at the top linking to different styles of the item, up to 56 links in some cases. Then each item listed has a link to the item's detail page and a link to the item's shop owner's page. So if a page has 50 items shown, there are really 100 links just for the inventory. This is not taking into account the header links, footer links, sidebar links to other sections on the site.
We have all these links to help consumers move through the site. The problem is that every item detail page on the site is not getting indexed and actually I think it's more like over 50% of the item detail pages are not indexed because the search engines are too busy following all these other links.
Should we nofollow, index the links to the different styles of the item, the shop owner page? Or what should we do to get the search engine bots to index our item detail pages?
-
CFSSEO,
Can you share the site so we can have a look at it to provide a better, more specific, answer for you? If not, I hope this general answer will help:
You should only have one canonical page per product. Even if there are product variants (size, color, etc...) those should typically be handled with a drop-down selector or checkbox on the product page instead of creating an entire new product page for each variant.
If this is a large affiliate or drop-shipping website where you are pulling in feeds from different merchants/distributors/stores the bitter pill you may have to swallow is that such sites are dying out in the SERPs because Google doesn't think they offer anything above and beyond their own search results. Someone wants to buy a Blue Widget and they go to Google and type "Cheap blue widget" and a bunch of merchants'/distributors' stores show up... why do they need to put another site in-between the searcher and their destination? The only way to work within this paradigm is to prune the site down and focus mostly on category-level searches, price comparison searches, etc... and by offering more useful features, including robust customer reviews for products and merchants, tools to help the shopper compare options, in-depth buying guides to educate shoppers on their choices... but thousands of product pages with default manufacturer content will no longer do the trick, and may actually harm the rest of your site.
This may or may not apply to your situation. It is tough to give advise like this without knowing the site in question. However, I hope it has helped point you in the right direction.
-
I'm worried the search engines are not indexing all the item detail pages due to too many links at the top of the inventory pages. There are so many options of itemA that there are 50 links about different types of itemA at the top of the page, then 50 items are shown with a link to the item detail page and a link to the 'shop' of that seller. Along with a search box on the page. And there could be hundreds of these items but default of 50 shown on a page. So there's well over 100 links on a page, and I'm worried the bots aren't finding all the item detail pages.
-
You have to reduce the number of pages that Google "sees" when you are showing search result pages. If you have too many sort versions on a given query, you are giving Google a bunch of duplicate (or closely duplicate) pages to spider and it prevents them from getting down into your item detail page.
I would find a way to setup a main / generic pagination result so that Google can spider that and then as they go through each page, they find links into the products. All the other versions of your search results, I would no follow links to them or put them in a folder that you can robots.txt.
This way consumers can search and sort to their hearts desire, but you provide a clear path for Google.
Also, be sure to setup a XML sitemap and include links to all of your item detail pages. You can also split out into multiple sitemaps if you have large enough number of item detail pages. A good article on this is here
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
-
Safest Route to Get from Drupal to Wordpress
Hi all, I have a prospective client who currently has a Drupal 7 site and they are interested in converting it to Wordpress (or simply building it new in Wordpress) and changing CMS. They would like to update the look of their site to make it a little more modern, but they are very concerned about preserving their SEO and rank, etc so they plan to keep the structure and urls, etc. pretty identical to what they have now with only minor cosmetic changes for the moment. I want to find the best and most economical route for them to take for a change like this. If an actual conversion/migration is the way to go, then I also want to help them find a professional developer they can trust to do the job correctly as I am not a Drupal person. I guess my question concerns what would be the safest and most economical route to preserve the SEO and rank, etc. that they have now? 1) Would that be an actual migration and conversion of their current site into a custom WP theme that's structured as closely as possible to the site currently? 2) Or, depending on the ultimate complexity of the site, would it be possible to leave out the step of migration altogether? Would there be huge cons or red flags to starting from scratch and manually building a custom WP theme while duplicating the architecture/links/urls, etc. as closely as possible to the current site? Anything else to be worried about if this is a possibility? 3) Or would you suggest some other way entirely? Thank you so much in advance for any guidance or suggestions on this! They are really nice people and I just want to make sure they do this safely because they get a lot of business from their site and they are justified to worry.
Web Design | | Pixelwik0 -
Ecommerce web design read more toggle vs menu link on home page and product pages
Hello, We have an Ecommerce store. We have a lot of content on the home page and product pages and we are going back and forth between which one to use between a toggle "Read More" "Show Less" toggle for each section and a anchor linked menu. We have long product pages We're thinking a read more toggle is more appropriate for category descriptions so that they can go at the top of the category and not take up space. But the read more toggle with lots of content scrolls the page down and doesn't scroll it back up when you hit "show less" We're leaning towards a linked menu for the home pages and product pages for this reason, but an accordion type set of toggles would look nicer. What do you recommend, and how have you set up your read more toggles if they have lots of info so that they are not confusing? Are there other options? ' Not looking for code (I can do that) I'm looking for ideas on the cleanest home page, category pages, and product pages when they have tons and tons of textual content. Wanting to trim it up and make it look compact and neat! Thanks!
Web Design | | BobGW0 -
Can a cloud based firewall affect my search ranking?
Hi, I recently implemented a firewall on my website to prevent hacking attacks. We were getting a crazy amount of people per day trying to brute force our website. I used the sucuri cloud proxy firewall service which they claim because of the super fast caching actually helps SEO. I was just wondering is this true? Because we're slowly falling further and further down the SERPS and i really don't know why. If not, is there any major google update recently I don't know about? Thanks, Robert
Web Design | | BearPaw880 -
Joomla Core Pages Delisted
Hey Everyone, This query may be more for a Joomla developer or someone that has had a similar issue. I'm not really looking for answers like, "check Google Search Console" or anything like that. We have a client who recently had all of their core pages delisted in Google but the blog is still being displayed in search results. For example, if you search "company name" they have a blog post that ranks #13 or so organically. I tested Google Search Console and Google is saying that the site is temporarily unavailable. We haven't made any changes or updates to Joomla's core structure so I'm unsure as to where this change is coming from. Here are some items we've checked: 1. Site searches within Google, resulted in seeing core pages are not indexed but blog pages are 2. Google Search Console - looked for manual actions (none found), looked at sitemap errors (nothing mentioned), looked at robots.txt (no issues here), attempted to fetch the site as Google (temporarily unavailable). 3. Called the hosting company (Rackspace) to discuss potential issues. They were extremely helpful but we were unable to find anything. The blog is actually a Module that was added so I'm thinking something has changed to block Google bots from the core Joomla structure but it hasn't blocked them from the blog structure. Without putting the company name or url on blast, has anyone heard of or experienced anything like this? Any help or insights would be much appreciated!
Web Design | | Leadhub0 -
Is my client getting overcharged?
My client has medium sized website (15k pages). They have a company that takes care of everything related to the website. Recently they decided to put a wordpress blog on the site, with a bought theme that only needed the yoast SEO plugin. On an extension like this www.domain.com/blog I could do this very quickly and I am not a professional programmer. The company claims it took them 40 hours and charged 40 x 125$ = 5,000 $ for it. That does not make sense to me at all. Can anyone explain to me how a clean wordpress install with a preselected theme can take 40 hours? Especially when the people that are installing it call themselves wordpress experts and make custom themes etc. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | Lebron270 -
Question #2: All of my INTERNAL links in OSE are being indexed from http://www.e.com/default.asp, and all my EXTERNAL links are linked to http://www.e.com/ am I getting a fraction of the link juice because of that?????
Hey guys, sorry for the really long question, but it appears that I am losing between 50 and 75 % of my link juice to my internal pages. In OSE all main category links (left sidebar) are being indexed from the URL that includes default.asp, even though NONE of my external links include that: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.uncommonthread.com%2FSulky-Thread-s%2F78.htm If you check the PA for http://www.uncommonthread.com/: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.uncommonthread.com%2F You see that it is practically double the PA of http://www.uncommonthread.com/default.asp: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.uncommonthread.com%2FDefault.asp **Also, non of my internal menu links are being indexed. ** Look at the menu on this page: http://www.uncommonthread.com/Sulky-Thread-s/78.htm and then look at the OSE information here for the "invisible thread" item from the menu on the page above^^^: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.uncommonthread.com%2FSulky-monofilament-s%2F54.htm Thanks SOOO much! Pre-thumbs and thanks to anyone that can lend me a seconds worth of advice! Thanks again for your time, Tyler A.
Web Design | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Should my link href be www or go direct to page?
Hi, just wondering which is the best format for linking to pages. In my navigation at the moment i have links like; Car Repair Services Is this the recommended format or should it be; Car Repair Services Many thanks for any answers. Alex
Web Design | | SeoSheikh0 -
Order of my products on page?
Hi, I read somewhere that Google reads a page in a certain way. All my product pages are listed (or most of them) in Alphabetical order. Now say I am targeting brands named Cruyff and Money Clothing, should I put all the Cruyff and Money products above everything else? See here for example... http://www.designerboutique-online.com/jackets/ They are in Alph order, except the sales items at the bottom. So would it be beneficial to do this? To put my targeted brands at the top of the page? And if not, is there anything I should be doing with the layout of the products to improve/help with SEO? Thanks Will
Web Design | | WillBlackburn0