Could a dropdown list of products dilute the page content?
-
Hi all,
On our site, due to the fact we only have some 120 or so products split across 5 different categories we have a dropdown menu that displays all of the products in the menu.
Forgetting usability for a moment, my question is whether by having links to all of products appear on each and every page (because they are in the main menu), are we diluting the content on the page. For example, if I take a particular product - the main phrase I want that page to be discovered for is "perspex sheet". This phrase does appear in the H1, H2 and within the main description of the product - but, as mentioned, each of our pages has some 120+ internal links due to the menu which contain all sorts of product names that arent relevant to "perspex sheet". The Moz report does flag a Medium issue on every page due to the number of internal links.
I don't know whether I'm making a fuss about nothing, or whether this does have some serious side effects. It's an eCommerce site so of course im nervous of making changes that could have an adverse affect on our rankings.
I thought there used to be a tool on Moz that showed what phrases a page was optimised for but i can no longer find that tool.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Al -
Hello Alastair,
You have two issues to be concerned with:
1. Dilution of content, as you described above.
2. Dilution of pagerank, as Blue Corona described above.
There are several approaches to consider that deal with both issues:
1. Don't worry about it because it's only 120 products/links.
Pros: easy.
Cons: Not optimal, and product catalog may continue to grow.2. Create "Silos" in which only other products from that category are linked to, rather than the entire product catalog.
Cons: Could be confusing to users when navigating the site. Pros: Effective SEO strategy in some cases, and would reduce the amount of product URLs linked to from each product page by about 1/5 (assuming an ~equal category distribution of products). Also, the links would be more relevant to each product page from which they're being linked - and would probably contain more relevant keywords than other categories, limiting dilution of content.3. Rather than siloing by category, add a navigation for Top Products (or similar) so you can choose ~25 of your top products (by whatever metrics make sense to the business, such as mark-up, demand, stock...) to boost with internal pagerank distribution (or "link juice" as it was put above).
4. Don't link to any products in the navigation and instead focus that pagerank into category pages, which you then optimize by adding helpful content and dealing with typically rampant pagination/canonicalization issues those pages have. Those category pages, once optimized, will funnel some of the pagerank into the product pages.
I like options #3 and #4 the best for most sites, but then most sites I work on have far more products to deal with.
-
Hi Alastair,
Moz has a great blog post that discusses how many links is too many. I would check that out for advice—while there isn't an exact number of links you should not exceed, many people suggest having fewer than 100 links per page.
Something I would be worried about is link juice. When your website receives a backlink from another website, hopefully with a high domain authority (YAY!), the link juice is being spread out to ALL the pages being linked from the page they are linking to.
This means if www.cnn.com (who has a domain authority of 96) links to your company's homepage, they would be spreading some of their authority to you through "link juice". But instead of retaining majority of that juice/authority on the homepage (thus increasing the authority on that page), you are going to be spreading fewer and fewer amounts of that authority through all 120+ pages linked from the homepage.
Check out this link juice diagram to get a visual representation of what I am talking about.
Hope this helps!
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
-
Why Product pages are throwing Missing field "image" and Missing field "price" in Wordpress Woocommerce
I have a wordpress wocommerce website where I have uploaded 100s of products but it's giving me error in GSC under merchant listing tab. When I tested it show missing field image and missing field price. I have done everything according to https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/product#merchant-listing-experiences and applied fixed i.e. images are 800x800 and price range is also there. What else can be done here?!merchant listing.jpg
Technical SEO | | Ravi_Rana0 -
'duplicate content' on several different pages
Hi, I've a website with 6 pages identified as 'duplicate content' because they are very similar. This pages looks similar because are the same but it show some pictures, a few, about the product category that's why every page look alike each to each other but they are not 'exactly' the same. So, it's any way to indicate to Google that the content is not duplicated? I guess it's been marked as duplicate because the code is 90% or more the same on 6 pages. I've been reviewing the 'canonical' method but I think is not appropriated here as the content is not the same. Any advice (that is not add more content)?
Technical SEO | | jcobo0 -
Old Content Pages
Hello we run a large sports website. Since 2009 we have been doing game previews for most games every day for all the major sports..IE NFL, CFB, NBA, MLB etc.. Most of these previews generate traffic for 1-2 days leading up to or day of the event. After that there is minimal if any traffic and over the years almost nothing to the old previews. If you do a search for any of these each time the same matchup happens Google will update its rankings and filter out any old matchups/previews with new ones. So our question is what would you do with all this old content? Is it worth just keeping? Google Indexes a majority of it? Should we prune some of the old articles? The other option we thought of and its not really practical is to create event pages where we reuse a post each time the teams meet but if there was some sort of benefit we could do it.
Technical SEO | | dueces0 -
Content relaunch without content duplication
We write great Content for blog and websites (or at least we try), especially blogs. Sometimes few of them may NOT get good responses/reach. It could be the content which is not interesting, or the title, or bad timing or even the language used. My question for the discussion is, what will you do if you find the content worth audience's attention missed it during its original launch. Is that fine to make the text and context better and relaunch it ? For example: 1. Rechristening the blog - Change Title to make it attractive
Technical SEO | | macronimous
2. Add images
3. Check spelling
4. Do necessary rewrite, spell check
5. Change the timeline by adding more recent statistics, references to recent writeups (external and internal blogs for example), change anything that seems outdated Also, change title and set rel=cannoical / 301 permanent URLs. Will the above make the blog new? Any ideas and tips to do? Basically we like to refurbish (:-)) content that didn't succeed in the past and relaunch it to try again. If we do so will there be any issues with Google bots? (I hope redirection would solve this, But still I want to make sure) Thanks,0 -
Is a canonical tag the best solution for multiple search listing pages in a site?
I have a site where dozens of page listings are showing in my report with a parameter showing the page number for the listings. Is the best solution to canonical these page listings back a core page (all-products)? Or, do I change my site configuration in Webmasters to ignore "page" parameters? What's the solution? Example URL 1- http://mydomain.com/products/all-products?page=84 Example URL 2- http://mydomain.com/products/all-products?page=85 Example URL 3- http://mydomain.com/products/all-products?page=86 Thanks in advance for your direction.
Technical SEO | | JoshKimber0 -
Amazon Product Descriptions and our website's product descriptions
I am updating our product descriptions site-wide. I wanted to also update our amazon listings for those same products. Is that considered duplicate content if it would be on amazon and our site? Is there any reason why I wouldn't want to do that? Is google product ads also a problem?
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
Duplicate content by php id,page=... problem
Hi dear friends! How can i resolve this duplicate problem with edit the php code file? My trouble is google find that : http://vietnamfoodtour.com/?mod=booking&act=send_booking&ID=38 and http://vietnamfoodtour.com/.....booking.html are different page, but they are one but google indexed both of them. And the Duplcate content is raised 😞 how can i notice to google that they are one?
Technical SEO | | magician0 -
Panda Update Question - Syndicated Content Vs Copied Content
Hi all, I have a question on copied content and syndicated content - Obviously copying content directly form another website is a big no no, but wanted to know how Google views syndicated content and if it views this differently? If you have syndicated content on your website, can you penalised from the lastest Panda update and is there a viable solutiion to address this? Mnay thanks Simon
Technical SEO | | simonsw0