ECWID Ecommerce Sitemaps (Lack of)
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
-
Ecommerce Category Pages
First, let's define the terminology for the various types of ecommerce pages. The terminology differs from organization to organization: Product Description Pages (PDPs): These pages have a single product, pricing, an "add to cart" button, reviews, and a product description. Product Listing Pages (PLPs): These are product category/subcategory pages that have product image links and text links to Product Description Pages (PDPs). Category Pages: These pages have subcategory image and text links to subcategory pages. No product images are displayed Hybrid Category Pages: these pages combine sub-Category Images and text at the top of the page and product listings below. Our CMS currently does not allow us to create hybrids. This conversation revolves primarily around mobile. Our ecommerce team is having discussions around the appropriate use of PLPs vs Category pages. After doing a quick audit of the mobile sites of some top ecommerce players, there is definitely a trend to use Category Pages at the top of the category and sub-category hierarchy and use PLPs at the very bottom. The logic from a usability perspective is to allow visitors to navigate a site without ever using the hamburger navigation. ex: Baby (Category Page) => Car Seats (Category Page) => Convertible Car Seats (PLP) The sites I audited all had hamburger menus. A visitor would navigate from a home page image for "Baby," an image on the "Baby" page to "Car Seats", and an image on the "Car Seats" page to the Convertible Car Seats page. At that point, they would be able to shop for "Convertible Car Seats" on a PLP. This appears to be excellent UX and easy to use navigation. Theoretically, good for SEO as well. In short, category and subcategory pages are being used as navigation to allow visitors to easily navigate to the bottom of the hierarchy and shop on the most narrow page in the hierarchy. Much easier to use than a hamburger menu, but it does entail more clicks. The discussion revolves around allowing users to shop for product at a higher level in the taxonomy. For example, what if a visitor wants to shop all Car Seats? In the above taxonomy, we are precluding users from shopping in this manner. There is no "Car Seats" PLP. Our CMS has the ability to create both a Category Page and a PLP for "Car Seats". We could theoretically place an image on the "Car Seats" category page for "View All Car Seats", and allow users to click to a "Car Seats" PLP. None of the major ecommerce players I've audited are adding a PLP option higher up in the hierarchy. That doesn't mean that it's not good UX. Problems: From an SEO perspective, having a Category Page and a PLP for "Car Seats" would cause cannibalization - they would be competing for the same keywords. I am skeptical that canonicals would work. The pages are not near duplicate content. One page has category images, the other has product images. We could place content blocks on the page to make them more similar. We could noindex the PLP, but that's a waste of internal link juice. Need advice: Will canonicals work in this situation? Should we trash this idea entirely? Does adding a PLP add value or confusion? Is noindex a good idea? Is there an option to target keyword variations with the PLP? Is there another solution?
Web Design | | Satans_Apprentice0 -
Best practices for ecommerce product categories?
I'm trying to optimise my ecommerce site's category/navigation structure so that it is: Intuitive for human users Keyword optimised, and Minimises duplicate content penalties Here is my dilemma. Let's say my site sells widgets. Some people search for widgets according to size (big widgets, medium widgets) while others search according to colour (green widgets, blue widgets). My keyword research suggests that I should target some keywords that relate to size, others that relate to colour, yet others relating to material, etc. I figured that I'd use one of these taxonomies as a category system, then set the others as filter elements. So my site's main navigation would say "Big Widgets | Medium Widgets | Small Widgets". If you click on any of them, or if you click on the "Widgets" supercategory, you'd reach a filter function allowing you to see only green widgets, or only plastic widgets, etc. So far so good - from a user perspective. The problem with this method is that Google isn't going to index my filter results. So someone Googling "green widgets" or "plastic widgets" is unlikely to find my site, even though I have plenty of green/plastic widgets that they could have filtered for. My next thought was to add some of these filter urls to my main navigation so they will be crawled. My filter mod generates urls for each filter (eg mysite.com/category?filter=k39;w24). So now I have a flashier navigation menu where clicking "Widgets" will pop out a panel allowing you to browse by size or by colour. I don't know whether users will find this helpful or redundant/confusing, but at least Google can see my filter urls. But I've run into two more problems. My filter results aren't really pages, so I can't set things like H1s, meta descriptions and so on. There's very little I can do to keyword optimise them. Further, I now have duplicate content, because the same widget can show up under multiple filter urls. And so I'm stuck here. I've thought about creating custom pages for each target keyword and manually listing products that pertain to each keyword. This will allow me to optimise the pages, but it's a lot of ongoing work (I have to update them whenever I get new stock), and I'm not sure my visitors will appreciate this - I suspect they would rather just browse/filter/search through my site than have to click through pages of manual curated content. I'd appreciate any thoughts or advice on figuring out my category and navigation system!
Web Design | | peekpeeka0 -
Sitemap Wordpress
My sitemap in wordpress is showing up like this http://arowautorental.com/sitemap/ but i got parents page on th website and i dont see it in the sitemap, how can i fix this?
Web Design | | dawgroup0 -
Blog is outranking ecommerce store
My client has a blog that posts information about products to support its ecommerce store. The blog's main purpose is to support the products listed on the main website, but it has become so strong that its posts sometimes rank in the SERPS in place of the website product page, which is undesirable. The blog posts always link to the product that they are supporting. Are there any other methods, other than doing a 301, that could help the product page to rank instead of the blog post?
Web Design | | pugh0 -
Sitemap Update Frequency?
Hello, My question today is regarding sitemaps. I'm often confused by this and because I am a bit obsessive I believe I may be giving myself more work than needed.. Basically my question is, do I need to update and/or re-generate my sitemap every time I make a change to the site? I mean, I must have to if I add a page, correct? And so in Google's Webmaster Tools, do I just delete the current sitemap and re-upload a new one for Google to crawl? Is it possible to overdo this? Any sitemap suggestions would be fantastic. I feel like there's been a few weeks where I've updated the sitemap daily and re-submitted it and I worry that might be hurting my site. Thanks!
Web Design | | jesse-landry0 -
Ecommerce & Responsive design
Hi there, We are thinking to redevelope our ecommerce websites and thinking responsive design. Due to responsive design when the screen gets smaller to fit iphone and ipad we need to hide some content to make it more user friendly. My question is, how Google will treat hiding content with the smaller screens? Will this effect our rankings in a negative way? We really don't want to get punished by Google 🙂 Thank You
Web Design | | Jvalops0 -
Infinite Scrolling vs. Pagination on an eCommerce Site
My company is looking at replacing our ecommerce site's paginated browsing with a Javascript infinite scroll function for when customers view internal search results--and possibly when they browse product categories also. Because our internal linking structure isn't very robust, I'm concerned that removing the pagination will make it harder to get the individual product pages to rank in the SERPs. We have over 5,000 products, and most of them are internally linked to from the browsing results pages in the category structure: e.g. Blue Widgets, Widgets Under $250, etc. I'm not too worried about removing pagination from the internal search results pages, but I'm concerned that doing the same for these category pages will result in de-linking the thousands of product pages that show up later in the browsing results and therefore won't be crawlable as internal links by the Googlebot. Does anyone have any ideas on what to do here? I'm already arguing against the infinite scroll, but we're a fairly design-driven company and any ammunition or alternatives would really help. For example, would serving a different page to the Googlebot in this case be a dangerous form of cloaking? (If the only difference is the presence of the pagination links.) Or is there any way to make rel=next and rel=prev tags work with infinite scrolling?
Web Design | | DownPour0 -
Suggestions For My Ecommerce Site
I am starting to work on an ecommerce site that I am part owner of. My partner who is the other owner started the site a while back and because he has no internet marketing experience the site didn't come out very well. I am currently overhauling the site and here is a list of things first on my list so I can at least get started on some seo and even ppc. I would really appreciate it if you could take a look at our store and see if you think I am missing anything or you could suggest anything else that really should be done immediately or something that is wrong. The site is www.clubfitnesswarehouse.com Update magento to newest version Fix url structure to be SEO friendly for homepage, category pages, product pages etc. For an example of a site that has great seo friendly urls please refer to examples on http://www.bigfitness.com/ site. For example these pages. http://www.bigfitness.com/treadmillstore.html , http://www.bigfitness.com/bosplincy.html , Remove top navigation menu and instead create left sidebar navigation menu created to navigate site and products. For example of these types of sidebars please refer to sidebar on http://www.bigfitness.com/ or http://www.americanfitness.net/ We will NOT be using same structure as what is in top navigation currently. Categories and keywords of categories will be changed and some will stay the same structure as is currently in navigation For header we would like to feature our shipping policy, returns, privacy policy, no sales tax etc. For example I have seen that I like refer to http://www.spiderofficechairs.com/ Obviously we do not want to copy but something similar for our own site. All images on homepage must be changed to include clickable txt so google can read text not just pictures. We would also like product pages modified to make more user friendly and conversion increased. Add to cart button needs to be changed, text needs to be brighter instead of dull grey color. Add to cart button must also be moved ABOVE THE FOLD! Also on product pages we would like to add sections in addition to Product Description, of Specs, and About section for each product page. We also need the ability to change this information as needed when we need to.
Web Design | | PEnterprises0