Will Moving Categories Affect SEO
-
I recently designed a new website to replace an old site. We managed to hold 90% ranking and traffic by keeping the same URS's and content.
Now that we have completed that we are now updating the whole site. It is an commerce website. Some of the items we were selling we are getting from a new vendor. If I move these products from one one vendor to another will this affect SEO?
Here is an example. I have a product called "Green Zipper Sweater". This product is Anchored via Manufacturer and Category. The URL and Title Tag are green-zipper-sweater. If the Sweater was made by "Nike Green Sweaters" and our new supplier is "Gap Yellow and Green Sweaters". If I change the the Manufacturer and now put it under "Gap Green and Yellow Sweaters" will this affect my ranking.
We are continuing to stock products from the original supplier "Nike Green Sweaters" and we have an aggressive SEO plan and are ranking very well for "Nike Green Sweaters". We also have good product ranking so "Green Zipper Sweater" brings us a lot of traffic. I want to be sure I do not loose ranking for the product page "Green Zipper Sweater" and the Brand "Nike Green Sweaters"
Any advice would be appreciated.
-
Hi
If you're URL / permalink is not changing than in theory all the off-page SEO for the page will be unaffected since the page still exists. So external link juice still has some where to go (to coin a phrase). But beware of the anchor text of the link (well be aware) - more about this below:
Andy makes a good point in that if you are changing manufacturer than most likely some of the text will change ( obviously "Nike" changes to "Gap" for example). So from an on-page SEO perspective the page has changed and this might affect how well the particular page ranks for "Nike Green Sweater" since quite obviously that particular page is no longer about Nike Green Sweaters and assuming the search engine bot is doing its job it will work this out and adjust indexing for that brand specific keyword combination.
To deal with that potential problem, I would suggest adding a link to the Nike Green Sweater page on the Gap Green Sweater page - you can do this quite naturally by adding a "related products" link or "people who bought this also bought" or "looking for Nike Green Sweater?" (for example).
This passes some of the link juice for your page to the Nike Green Sweater page.
Helping Nike Green Sweater Wearers...or Another Reason for an Internal Link:
Creating an internal link to the Nike Green Sweater page also helps people who came to your site through a link that explicitly referred to "Nike Green Sweaters" and were looking for "Nike Green Sweaters". (You could use a tool like AHREFs or Google Webmaster or Open Site Explorer to find the anchor text being used by people externally linking to you to get a sense of the scale of this "problem". )
-
FWIW, here's how I would attack this problem with SEO and internet marketing in mind:
- Add your new manufacturer as a separate entity/category... don't change the name of the existing category.
- When your inventory for the old manufacturer is sold through, build a separate landing page for that manufacturer. (ie domain.com/nike-green-sweaters)
- 301 redirect all of your former Nike green sweater inventory URLs and category page URLs to the new landing page /nike-green-sweaters/
- On /nike-green-sweaters/, include a transparent blurb informing potential customers that you no longer carry those products, but your store now proudly provides Gap Green Sweaters - or whatever the new product is (Gap green zipper sweater, green zipper sweater, etc.).
- Anchor text link in-content to your new manufacturer category with the highest volume, short tail keyword.
- Include maybe 2-4 more top products from that new manufacturer, and link to those pages with keyword rich anchors, too.
- BONUS: include an Amazon affiliate link or something similar to another retailer who sells the former product on that page, too - so at least if you refer some sales for the old product through your page, you can make something back for it!
Hope this is helpful. Good luck!
-
if i understand the question correctly and you are changing manufacturer. You have the potential to lose traffic as your page will no longer contain the text 'old manufacture name', so therefore wont rank for it this term.
If your urls aren't changing you shouldn't lose to as much visibility as any links etc pointing here will still be valid.
The only area where you could lose visibility is in the old manufacturers name if this had more search volume that the new manufacturer.
-
No they will be staying the same.
-
Is the permalink / URL changing for the product?
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
-
Crawler errors or Page Load Time? What affect more to SEO
Hello, I have a page with a forum and at this moment the moz report says that have 15.1k of issues like url too long, meta noindex, title too long etc. But this page have a load time realy sloooow with 11 seconds. I know i need fix all that errors (i'm working on this) but... What is more important for SEO? The page load or that type of error like duplicate titles etc. Thank you!
Moz Pro | | DanielExposito1 -
Hiring for SEO
so sorry if i offend anyone here ...but dang SEO Experts are the used car sale guy of 1999! we have a small eCommerce company in Jacksonville, FL - and we are always looking for improve our SEO - we have been members of moz for almost 10 years now! We have learned alot with all the tools they offer, We have tried at least 5 local and national SEO consultants, agencies and consultants - NONE HAVE WORKED. The time has come for us to hire an in house SEO do you have any advise on how a small business that wants to grow our SEO can weed thru the thousands of SEO "GURU's" out there today - Everyone is an expert. On a side not if you want to move to Florida and help us grow - www.HolmesStamp.com/team
Moz Pro | | BryanCroft1 -
Local SEO does not rank well
Hello everybody, before 3 months i began seo in gialia.net.gr. Its an eshop based on symfony framework. We started with on-page seo optimization and after making links in directories, forums and article directories. After 2 months we saw rankings for niche keywords (γυαλια ηλιου, γυαλια ηλιου προσφορες) at 5th and 8th page of google.gr. Now, the rankings does down and i cannot unserstand the reason. I checked old backlinks with opensite explorer, and found some spam backlinks links (3/10). Is this the reason that seo not going well? I am very dissapointed and i would like to tell me you opinion about what is going wrong with that site. My customer owns one more domain, fotispapoulias.gr and i am thinking to move all the site that is running on gialia.net.gr to fotispapoulias.gr (301 redirect to all links). The fotispapoulias.gr ranks better in the same niche keywords without seo. Is it good idea? Will achieve better rankings or not? Thanks
Moz Pro | | simplewebsol0 -
New to Moz, need some probably basic answers about Keywords, Linking, Competitors and General SEO
Hi, So I have quite a lot of data colelcted about my site now, regarding keyword research, page crawling and competitor research ect. But I find myself second guessing myself about what I have done and what to do next. I have done basic research for as many relevant keywords I could think of to my site, including branded and non branded terms. If the main competitive keywords for my niche are very competitive, shall I start doing more research for long tail keywords and only try to rank for them? Does is matter how many keywords I am doing research for? Does is matter how many keywords I try to optimise for each webpage? Are the amount of branded keywords I am researching skewing my results? As they are all ranked #1, but nearly all of the non branded keywords are much further down the list... Once I have decided what keywords are worth trying to ranking for for each page, are the techniques to actually rank more highly for them - Title, H1 Tag, Description, Meta Data, Fresh Content and using the keywords on the page? Or are there more techniques I haven't heard of? Under Keyword Rankings - I noticded that some of my keywords are directing to specific pages, like "Cavity Waxes" is directing to the URL ending in .com/cavity-waxes - How do you assign the keywords im researching to specific URLs? - Or does Moz do it automatically? As most of my keywords seem to be unassigned to any URL, is that because they are not ranking highly enough? How do I best use the data collected through Moz? Good practices? Techniques? Tips and Tricks? What is the best practice for finding potential link partners and asking them for mutual linking? Techniques for finding partners that are likely to link with us, but still provides link juice. I must apologise for this long-winded set of questions, but these are troubling me! Any help would be greatly appreciated, Kind regards, Max Johnson
Moz Pro | | BiltHamber10 -
Following moz guideliness complety, will it certainly improve keyword rankings, domain authority
Hi! G’day to you. I am Naresh from Dotline Infotech. I’d like to take up couple of concerns to be clarified for my better understanding on Moz tool. Indeed, Moz is a nice SEO tool that helps in improving Search engine optimization comprehensive process. We are moz pro member since a year. Moz has equally bifurcated every SEO activity and rate it according to its own benchmark. I intend to ask a series of concerns; Q1. Moz has page grading system A to F. According to Moz guidelines, if the keywords on the page gets repeated minimum 4 times, Moz consider it as ‘A’ grading (one of Moz metric to evaluating the page). Whereas, Google indicates repetition of same keywords time and again is treated as keyword stuffing. According to me, if keywords are already within the content one or two time and furnishing relevant information, why keywords re-occurrence to be 4 time. Does the repetition of same keywords 4 times will lead to give more valuable information? Just a request to let me share why we should unnecessarily repeat keywords? Q2. As per Google guidelines, only 3 keywords can be placed in title tag and also advisable to use only one h1 tag instead of multiple. Among 3 keywords in title tag, only one main keyword can be used in H1 tag. Moz gives much weight age to that particular keyword placed in H1 tag but rest two keywords does not get any importance. I just like to know if we use three H1 tags within page, will it increase the page grading or not. Q3. Does Moz tool have its own index data or refer to Google’s ones? Q4. Following the Moz guidelines completely, will it be 100% sure all our keyword rankings, page authority, domain authority certainly be improved. Looking forward to hear you soon. Thanks
Moz Pro | | dotlineseo0 -
SERPs ans SEO
I am trying to analyze my site to determine what we may be doing wrong as far as our site goes Ilike everyone else I suppose). In any event I have followed as much as I can from the Moz guideline and tools. We were ranking very well for quite some time and now..kaput. We have tried to make our site faster (using Google Page Speed ..the CDM for GOOGLE). We have also tried redoing out title and description tags to be more search and user friendly. Our site is very fast now...which is good. But we are still not seeing the rankings improvements that we had hoped for. We have built the site using WP and broke the template to make what we feel is an attractive site....used what we feel are the best plugins to capitalize....can anyone give us some feedback to let us know if we are just missing something here. We are RELEVANT to our industry...
Moz Pro | | AdsOnWheels0 -
SEO Tools; which ones can you NOT live without?
There's loads of free and paid SEO tools out there and I'm trying to find out which ones make up a common denominator for most professional SEOs.
Moz Pro | | MassivePrime0 -
<bs>Will someone give me a "thumbs up" so I can become an Authority and get my SEOMOZ T-Shirt?</bs>
<bs>I have helped many people (probably 100s) here in the forums. My fingers are swollen and I can't answer questions right now. I want my SEOmoz t-Shirt for becoming an Authority, but I'm a few points shy. Any help would be appreciated.</bs> Watch people give me a thumbs down. LOL
Moz Pro | | Francisco_Meza3