How many product subcategories are ok?
-
Let's say I have a sea glass ankle bracelet. On my site, my main keyword is "Sea Glass Jewelry" and have ranked relatively well for this, but this main page has over 200 products in it. I thought that if the URL has the keywords in it, it would be beneficial. I also have a section for all my bracelets, so it would be there and then, a more specific ankle bracelets category. So, technically, an ankle bracelet will show up 3x.
Sea Glass Jewelry (all products go here)
Bracelets (all bracelets go here)
Ankle Bracelets (only ankle bracelets)
The URL is only attached to the main category so to speak. If you click the ankle bracelets category, the url will still revert back to the original main category: seaglassjewelry/sterlinganklebracelet so I don't believe there is duplicate content.
I have had my domain for years and it has ranked well until someone hacked into my site 2 years back. I have never been able to recover from this loss. Since then, I have tried to optimize my site, but nothing seems to be working and I just want to make sure that I am not hurting my ranking by doing this.
Can someone confirm this is the best way to do it or make a suggestion? Thank you.
-
2 years back....that's going to be right in the middle of a lot of Google algo changes, both Panda and Penguin. It might be just a coincidence that your traffic drop was around when the hacking happened.
Have you done a backlink analysis? It could be that the hackers also planted a ton of crappy links in the hopes of short-term getting your site to rank well for whatever they're trying to inject into your site and sell.
Sounds like you're doing the right thing with the URLs though. To do a double-check on the duplicate content side, you could run Screaming Frog against it, and check for duplicate page titles and meta descriptions. If your pages are getting spit out with multiple URLs, you'll see them all show up with duplicates.
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
-
Many have stolen our content. Rewrite vs. DMCA content removal?
Hello, We own a medical tourism website and many other sites have stolen (copied and pasted) our content. Our content is more than 2 years old, so we thought we could rewrite the content - but Which is a more wiser decision from you guys' experience? Archive our current content at a different URL and upload a fresh content in the current URL Claim our originality to Google and ask the stolen sites to remove our content. Thank you and appreciate your time.
On-Page Optimization | | joony0 -
Does having landing page text beneath the products at the base of the page hinder SEO?
I have a site that is capable of hosting the landing page description either above the products under the H1 or below them at the bottom of the page before the footer. I have always chosen to keep the text "above the fold" as presumably this would be crawled sooner in relation to the rest of the page content than had it been at the bottom. However, this means that I can only really write just a few sentences for each landing page - otherwise the products would shift further down the page - and I don't think this is good from a UX POV. Question: If I move the bulk of my landing page descriptions to the text snippet located underneath the products, could this negatively affect my SEO? Text at the bottom of the page is obviously not significant for users, so is there a chance this could be seen as spam?
On-Page Optimization | | Silkstream0 -
Internal and Link Juice Analysis - Too Many Links Error
Howdy! I have an analysis question related to internal links/link juice. Here is the general link set up of our site: 1. All Site Pages (Including Home Page): We have drop down "mega" menus in the header of everypage linking to various sub-categories on the site. So, because of this, in our header, we have a few hundred links to various pages on our site and these show up on every page of the site. 2. Product Pages: Header pages as mentioned above, but on top of that, we list out the keywords for that particular product and each keyword is linked back to our search results pages for that particular keyword. In General Moz is telling us we are having between 200-300 links on each product page. Currently, our Search Results pages are ranking higher and showing up in search more than our actual product pages. So, based on the above info, here are some thoughts: 1. Should we ajax in the Header links so that they aren't showing up for the search engines? Or, should we ajax them in only on all pages that are not the Home Page? 2. Should we get rid of the keyword links back to the Search Results pages that are on the product pages? What effect would these changes "actually" have? Does this just improve crawling? Or are there other positive results that would come of changes like these? We have hundreds of thousands of products, so if we were to make changes like these, could we experience negative results? Thanks for your help! Craig
On-Page Optimization | | TheCraig0 -
Using example.info when example.com is a link farm. Ok? Bad? Doesn't matter?
Second question of the day- I'm helping a friend with his law firm site. He is using example.info because example.com is being used by a link farm. Is this hurting his search efforts? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | ahossom0 -
Too Many On-Page Links Reported By SEOmoz
Hi, I recently did run a crawl report for my blog dapazze.com, and found that SEOmoz is reporting many pages on my blog having more than 100 internal links. I opened OSE, and made a search for one of my pages which was reported to contain more than 100 links. And I found it to contain 464 internal links. Here is the link: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=dapazze.com%2F2012%2F10%2Fwin-a-commentluv-premium-single-site-and-multi-site-license-worth-about-154-giveaway-of-october%2F&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=internal&target=page&group=0 Please have a look at it. I have chosen - Show "All" links from "only internal" pages to "this page" option in OSE, which reports me this. I see almost every page in my blog linking to every page. This is not the problem for me. I have also tried to make a search for some popular bloggers, like ProBlogger.net, ShoutMeLoud.com, HellBoundBloggers.com, etc, and all of them have the same problem. Should I be worrying about this problem? What is the problem actually?
On-Page Optimization | | rahulchowdhury0 -
How Do You Build Good Quality Content on an E-Commerce Site with over 1500 products?
I've been told for a while now that quality is king, and as far as the top level down goes, I have improved the quality of these pages incredibly, working from the landing page down to the categories. Now the problem comes when I know that if I describe each product dynamically with great content, this give the best result, yet doing this on over 1500 products is just a mammoth task for anyone, isn't it? I want a way to have good quality content on each of those pages without writing a million words.... is this possible?
On-Page Optimization | | frank-2443750 -
Duplicate product urls
Our site automatically creates shorter urls for the products. There is a rel canonical tag in place, but webmaster tools shows these urls have duplicate title tags. Here is an example: http://www.colemanfurniture.com/holden-desk.htm http://www.colemanfurniture.com/writing-desks-secretary-desks/holden-desk.htm Should the longer url be redirected to the shorter one?
On-Page Optimization | | thappe0 -
Product Title Formating Question
The majority of the products I sell require lengthy product titles, I have 600+ items that have titles over 70+ characters. In the interest of reducing the character count (Product Feeds) I'm trying to eliminate unnecessary "stop words" in the titles, such as "and", "with" etc.. I've listed an example of a current product listing below, followed by two different formats to reduce the character count. Which one if any is better for SEO or should I leave my titles alone and stick with my original format? Current Listing Example: DeWalt Dual Comfort Safety Glasses with Black Frame and Clear Anti-Fog Lens Suggested Listing Example: DeWalt Dual Comfort Safety Glasses-Black Frame-Clear Anti-Fog Lens DeWalt Dual Comfort Safety Glasses/Black Frame/Clear Anti-Fog Lens
On-Page Optimization | | MEldridge0
