What to do when all products are one of a kind WYSIWYG and url's are continuously changing. Lots of 404's
-
Hey Guys, I'm working on a website with WYSIWYG one of a kind products and the url's are continuously changing. There are allot of duplicate page titles (56 currently) but that number is always changing too.
Let me give you guys a little background on the website. The site sells different types of live coral. So there may be anywhere from 20 - 150 corals of the same species. Each coral is a unique size, color etc. When the coral gets sold the site owner trashes the product creating a new 404. Sometimes the url gets indexed, other times they don't since the corals get sold within hours/days. I was thinking of optimizing each product with a keyword and re-using the url by having the client update the picture and price but that still leaves allot more products than keywords.
Here is an example of the corals with the same title http://austinaquafarms.com/product-category/acans/
Thanks for the help guys. I'm not really sure what to do.
-
Hey Aron
Just wanted to chime in on the wordpress bit. EGOL nailed the core answer though. But for the noindex, yes you can just noindex any pages you want to and this isn't going to cause any issues. Noindexed pages do not count towards Panda or low user metrics in the algo, so it's a great way to let the content exist but not have it cause trouble in the SERPs.
-Dan
-
The way woocommerce works is by creating a custom post type. (similar to a regular blog post but styled for products) and then dynamically adds the products to a product category page or anywhere else I want them displayed. Creating a custom post type for products also enables allot of customization and even advanced reporting.
-
....but the product url will always be there.
I agree..... but if you never link to that page then Google should not know about it.
I am not familiar with Wordpress and Woocommerce, however, the shopping systems that I have used all allowed me to create "add to cart" buttons. I could place these anywhere on the site - even in pdf documents. I have never used the product pages that my shopping systems produce. Why? I think that I can make product pages that are better optimzied for search and better arranged for customers. So, I have lots of pages on my site that list multiple items and almost no pages that list a single item. This has saved me a lot of time, I think that my site competes a lot better, I think that it makes more convenient shopping and I believe that I sell a lot more.
-
Well I'm not sure it's possible to remove the product pages since the site is built with WordPress and Woocommerce. Each product creates a url. I can create a quick view box with an add to cart button for a better user experience but the product url will always be there.
Thinking about what you said I may have a few options but I may be way off.
1. I can optimize the category page for the product keywords with more content and details. Then I can noindex all the product pages.
2. I can optimize the single product pages and add unique content to each product for about 10 products and noindex the rest.
Not sure if noindexing would be the right way to do it or if it would add more issues. Since I'm using WordPress and the yoast seo plugin I can have the website owner check the noindex button on all new products created. What do you think?
As far as content we are in the process of putting together a full content strategy and will have many tutorials and other great care info along with industry tips and blog posts.
-
Awesome coral! Awesome. http://austinaquafarms.com/product-category/acans/
If this was my site, I would make it just a few pages. One page for each type of coral.
The individual product pages on the site right now have almost no information. So, I would put all of the information on a huge category page and optimize it perfectly for the type of coral. Plus I would add several authoritative paragraphs of text onto the page - maybe in the right side bar with background info about the type of coral, how to care for it, tips for making it do well in your tank. This extra content will enable the page to be more competitive and will pull in traffic for long tail keywrods.
Eliminating the product pages will eliminate the 404 problems, simplify maintaining the site and when visitor lands on the Acans page they will say WOW! I think you will sell more... from this presentation... no guarantees, just my gut.
I also believe that it will pull all of the power that has seeped into the product pages back into the category page. From my experience, a compact site with a small number of pages competes a LOT better than a larger site with a bunch of pages with very thin content.
Those thin content pages also put this site at risk for Panda problems if it does not have them already.
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 get a large number of urls out of Google's Index when there are no pages to noindex tag?
Hi, I'm working with a site that has created a large group of urls (150,000) that have crept into Google's index. If these urls actually existed as pages, which they don't, I'd just noindex tag them and over time the number would drift down. The thing is, they created them through a complicated internal linking arrangement that adds affiliate code to the links and forwards them to the affiliate. GoogleBot would crawl a link that looks like it's to the client's same domain and wind up on Amazon or somewhere else with some affiiiate code. GoogleBot would then grab the original link on the clients domain and index it... even though the page served is on Amazon or somewhere else. Ergo, I don't have a page to noindex tag. I have to get this 150K block of cruft out of Google's index, but without actual pages to noindex tag, it's a bit of a puzzler. Any ideas? Thanks! Best... Michael P.S., All 150K urls seem to share the same url pattern... exmpledomain.com/item/... so /item/ is common to all of them, if that helps.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Migrating to WooCommerce, similar product descriptions but with different urls, cant use variations.
Hi! Ime quite new to SEO and to woocommerce so please help out with this one.. We are migrating from Ithemes Exchange over to WooCommerce and i have come up with some issues. We are selling adhesives and some of the products have the same name and description, the only thing that seperates them are sometimes the widht, or the length on the roll.. As we have it now we have a separate product page for each widht and length. For example here http://siga-sverige.se/siga/fentrim-2-100/ and here http://siga-sverige.se/siga/fentrim-2-150/ The above product pages are for a product called Fentrim 2. its availiable in widhts from 75 to 300mm.. so, its six diffent products pages with more or less the same description. I get that this will create duplicate content, couse the description on the pages are similar.. We cant use variations in woocommerce, couse this cant be set up to exactly match our shipping needs, so, we need them on separate pages.. Soo, my plan is to set a new product page for Fentrim 2, ex http://siga-sverige.se/siga/fentrim-2 and then set that url as canonical url for the variations of the product.. Am i on the right track? Gratefull for any help on this one! / Jonas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knubbz1 -
'Nofollow' footer links from another site, are they 'bad' links?
Hi everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | romanbond
one of my sites has about 1000 'nofollow' links from the footer of another of my sites. Are these in any way hurtful? Any help appreciated..0 -
What's the deal with significantLinks?
http://schema.org/significantLink Schema.org has a definition for "non-navigation links that are clicked on the most." Presumably this means something like the big green buttons on Moz's homepage. But does anyone know how they affect anything? In http://moz.com/blog/schemaorg-a-new-approach-to-structured-data-for-seo#comment-142936, Jeremy Nelson says " It's quite possible that significant links will pass anchor text as well if a previous link to the page was set in navigation, effictively making obselete the first-link-counts rule, and I am interested in putting that to test." This is a pretty obscure comment but it's one of the only results I could find on the subject. Is this BS? I can't even make out what all of it is saying. So what's the deal with significantLinks and how can we use them to SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NerdsOnCall0 -
Effect SERP's internal 301 redirects?
I'm considering installing Wordpress for my website. So I have to change the static URL's from /webpage.html to /webpage/. Yet I don't want to lose in the SERP's. What should I expect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wellnesswooz1 -
Overly-Dynamic URLs & Changing URL Structure w Web Redesign
I have a client that has multiple apartment complexes in different states and metro areas. They get good traffic and pretty good conversions but the site needs a lot of updating, including the architecture, to implement SEO standards. Right now they rank for " <brand_name>apartments" on every place but not " <city_name>apartments".</city_name></brand_name> There current architecture displays their URLs like: http://www.<client_apartments>.com/index.php?mainLevelCurrent=communities&communityID=28&secLevelCurrent=overview</client_apartments> http://www.<client_apartments>.com/index.php?mainLevelCurrent=communities&communityID=28&secLevelCurrent=floorplans&floorPlanID=121</client_apartments> I know it is said to never change the URL structure but what about this site? I see this URL structure being bad for SEO, bad for users, and basically forces us to keep the current architecture. They don't have many links built to their community pages so will creating a new URL structure and doing 301 redirects to the new URLs drastically drop rankings? Is this something that we should bite the bullet on now for future rankings, traffic, and a better architecture?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JaredDetroit0 -
Soft 404's from pages blocked by robots.txt -- cause for concern?
We're seeing soft 404 errors appear in our google webmaster tools section on pages that are blocked by robots.txt (our search result pages). Should we be concerned? Is there anything we can do about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline4 -
There's a website I'm working with that has a .php extension. All the pages do. What's the best practice to remove the .php extension across all pages?
Client wishes to drop the .php extension on all their pages (they've got around 2k pages). I assured them that wasn't necessary. However, in the event that I do end up doing this what's the best practices way (and easiest way) to do this? This is also a WordPress site. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digisavvy0