[Advice] Dealing with an immense URl structure full of canonicals with Budget & Time constraint
-
Good day to you Mozers,
I have a website that sells a certain product online and, once bought, is specifically delivered to a point of sale where the client's car gets serviced.
This website has a shop, products and informational pages that are duplicated by the number of physical PoS. The organizational decision was that every PoS were supposed to have their own little site that could be managed and modified.
Examples are:
- Every PoS could have a different price on their product
- Some of them have services available and some may have fewer, but the content on these service page doesn't change.
I get over a million URls that are, supposedly, all treated with canonical tags to their respective main page. The reason I use "supposedly" is because verifying the logic they used behind canonicals is proving to be a headache, but I know and I've seen a lot of these pages using the tag.
i.e:
- https:mysite.com/shop/ <-- https:mysite.com/pointofsale-b/shop
- https:mysite.com/shop/productA <-- https:mysite.com/pointofsale-b/shop/productA
The problem is that I have over a million URl that are crawled, when really I may have less than a tenth of them that have organic trafic potential.
Question is:
For products, I know I should tell them to put the URl as close to the root as possible and dynamically change the price according to the PoS the end-user chooses. Or even redirect all shops to the main one and only use that one.I need a short term solution to test/show if it is worth investing in development and correct all these useless duplicate pages. Should I use Robots.txt and block off parts of the site I do not want Google to waste his time on?
I am worried about: Indexation, Accessibility and crawl budget being wasted.
Thank you in advance,
-
Hey Chris!
Thanks a lot for your time. I did send you a PM the day after your original post, I will send you another :).
Thanks a lot for your additionnal advice. You're right about managing client's expectations and its crucial. You're pointing out some valid points and I will have to ponder about how I approach this whole situation.
Charles,
-
Hey Charles,
No problem, I've been out of the office most of the past week so I'm trying to catch up on a few of these now, sorry! I don't recall seeing any PMs either.
I feel weird to recommend shaving 3/4 of their site on which they put a lot of money in.
That's perfectly normal and I'd have the same reservations. If you do decide to go ahead with it though (and I'm absolutely not looking to push you into a decision either way, just providing the info) you can highlight the fact that paying a lot of money for a website doesn't make it inherently good. If those extra pages are providing no unique value then they're just a hindrance to their long-term goal of earning a return from that site via organic traffic.
It's a conversation we have semi-regularly with new clients. They think that because they just spent $20k on a new site, making changes to it is silly and a waste of the money they invested in the first place. "Sure it's broken but it was expensive"... I don't think search engines or users really care how much it cost
in the eyes of the client, it may come off as bold.
It certainly is bold and don't be fooled, there is a reasonable chance their rankings will get worse before they get better. In some cases when we perform a cleanup like this we'll see a brief drop before a steady improvement.
This doesn't happen all the time by any means, in fact we did a smaller scale version of this last week for two new clients and both have already started moving ahead over the weekend without a drop in rankings prior. It's really just about managing expectations and pitching the long term benefit over the short term fear.
Just be very careful in the way you project-manage it - be meticulous with updating internal links and 301 any pages that have external links pointing to them as well. You want to end up with a clean, efficient and crawlable website that retains as much value as possible.
You understand many sets of eyes are directed at them and a lot is to gain.
Also a very valid concern!
I'm probably not telling you anything you don't already know anyhow so don't think I'm trying to lecture you on how to do your job, just sharing my knowledge and anecdotal evidence on similar things.
-
Hey Chris!
Thanks for that lenghty response. It is very much appreciated and so is your offer for help. Let me check with some people to see if I can share the company's name.
[EDIT] Sent you a private msgOne of the reason I want to test the waters is, to be real honest, I feel weird to recommend shaving 3/4 of their site on which they put a lot of money in. I guess it comes down to reassuring them that these changes will be positive, but in the eyes of the client, it may come off as bold.
Another thing is, it is an international business that have different teams for different country. For more than 20 countries, they are the only one to try and sell their product online. You understand many sets of eyes are directed at them and a lot is to gain.
-
Hi Charles,
That's a tough one! I definitely see the motivation to test the waters here first before you go spending time on it but it will likely take less time than you think and either way, the user experience will be significantly better once you're done so I'd expect that either way, your time/dev investment would likely be viable.
I suppose you could block certain sections via Robots and wait to measure the results but I'd be more inclined to throw on the gloves and get elbow deep!
You've already mentioned the issues the current structure causes so you are aware of them which is great. With those in mind, focus on the user experience. What is it they're looking for on your site? How would they expect to find it? Can they find the solution with as few clicks as practical?
Rand did a Whiteboard Friday recently on Cleaning up the Cruft which was a great overview of the broader areas you can often trim your site back down to size. For me anyway, the aim is to have as few pages on the site as practical. If a page(s), category, tag etc doesn't need to exist then just remove it!
It's hard to say or to give specific advice here without seeing your site but chances are if you were to sit down and physically map out your website you'd find a lot of redundancy that, once fixed, would cut your million pages down to a significantly more manageable number. A recent example of this for us was a client who had a bunch of redundant blog categories and tags as well as multiple versions of some URLs due to poor internal linking. We cut their total URL volume from over 300 to just 78 and that alone was enough to significantly improve their search visibility.
I'd be happy to take a closer look at this one if you're willing to share your URL, though I understand if you're not. Either way, the best place to start here will be reviewing your site structure and seeing if it truly makes sense.
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
-
Canonical Issue On AMP
Hi everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MuhammadQasimAttari
I have one issue about canonical. kindly guide me about it. I have a site example.com/abc and I convert it on an amp and know its URLs is example.com/abc=?amp. but the search console tells me to add the proper canonical URL but both pages are the same. kindly guide me about it. what will I do?0 -
Canonical Confusion
So I have products appearing in several categories, all of which have the correct canonical url. But Moz is flagging up pages I never knew existed, and I don't understand why they exist at all and more so why my canonical fix isn't occurring for them, as below: SEO Friendly URL: http://thespacecollective.com/nasa-pin-sets/nasa-shuttle-mission-pin-set-no2 Weird URL to same product: http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=themecontrol/product&product_id=159 Is this a developer problem rather than an SEO problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Replace dynamic paramenter URLs with static Landing Page URL - faceted navigation
Hi there, got a quick question regarding faceted navigation. If a specific filter (facet) seems to be quite popular for visitors. Does it make sense to replace a dynamic URL e.x http://www.domain.com/pants.html?a_type=239 by a static, more SEO friendly URL e.x http://www.domain.com/pants/levis-pants.html by creating a proper landing page for it. I know, that it is nearly impossible to replace all variations of this parameter URLs by static ones but does it generally make sense to do this for the most popular facets choose by visitors. Or does this cause any issues? Any help is much appreciated. Thanks a lot in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ennovators0 -
Crawl budget
I am a believer in this concept, showing google less pages will increase their importance. here is my question: I manage a website with millions of pages, high organic traffic (lower than before). I do believe that too many pages are crawled. there are pages that I do not need google to crawl and followed. noindex follow does not save on the mentioned crawl budget. deleting those pages is not possible. any advice will be appreciated. If I disallow those pages I am missing on pages that help my important pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ciznerguy2 -
Rel=Canonical=CONFUSED
Hey, I am a confused canonical and here's why - please help! I have a master website called www.1099pro.com and then many other websites that simply duplicate the material on the master site (i.e www.1099A.com, www.1099T.com, www.1099solution.com, and the list goes on). These other domains & pages have been around for long enough that they have been able to garner some page authority & domain authority that it makes it worthwhile to redirect them to their corresponding pages on www.1099pro.com. The problem is two-fold when trying to pass this link-juice: I do not have access to the web-service that hosts the other sites/domains and cannot 301 redirect them The other sites/domains are setup so that whatever changes I make to www.1099pro.com are automatically distributed across all the other sites. This means that when I put on www.1099pro.com it also shows up on all the other domains. It is my understanding that having on a site such as www.1099solution.com does not pass any link juice and actually eliminates that page from the search results. Is there any way that I can pass the link juice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stew2220 -
Multilingual and Multiregional SEO URL Structure
Hello 2 questions: I have a client that has country specific TLDs and has pages for each city and wants to target languages. What's the best practice? or does the order not matter? www.domain.ca/fr-ca/toronto www.domain.ca/toronto/fr-ca 2. This client currently has the following URL structure, is this not SEO friendly? does it matter to have Canada repeated? www.domain.ca/canada/fr-ca/toronto Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nrv0 -
What is the best canonical url to use for a product page?
I just helped a client redesign and launch a new website for their organic skin care company (www.hylunia.com). The site is built in Magento which by default creates MANY urls for each product. Which of these two do you think would be the best to use as the canonical version? http://www.hylunia.com/pure-hyaluronic-acid-solution
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielmoss
or http://www.hylunia.com/products/face-care/facial-moisturizers/pure-hyaluronic-acid-solution ? I'm leaning on the latter, because it makes sense to me to have the breadcrumbs match the url string, and also it seems having more keywords in the url would help. However, it's obviously a very long url, and there might be some benefits to using the shorter version that I'm not aware of. Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts. Best, Daniel0 -
Is having a canonical tag for the link that IS the canonical a negative thing?
Throughout our site, canonical tags have been added where needed. However, the canonical tags are also included for the canonical itself. For example, for www.askaquestion.com, the canonical tag has been added as www.askaquestion.com. Will this have a negative impact or does it not really matter whether there is such a loop?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kbbseo0