Why does my ecommerce category page have such low PA?
-
I'm a bit of a newbie to the game and I've learnt a lot over the past couple of days with a Moz subscription. I'm starting to put together a strategy to improve our SEO performance and get our site ranking higher for some specific terms.
We have a low domain authority at 25. The page I am concerned about is one of our main product categories, link here.
About a year and half a go we changed our domain name and did a 301 redirect on all our category, products and content pages. Would this have affected anything? These redirects are still in place. I also notice OSE shows now inbound links. I'm almost certain there are a few around though.
Most recently we've been investing in unique descriptions for all products in this category at around 60 words per product, this excludes the product features in a tabular format. I appreciate this isn't many words.
I have also read a lot about faceted navigation and this category suffers from a very flat product structure were facet navigation is used heavily by the user to find a product that matches their requirements.
Does anybody have any ideas about this?
-
Hi Joe,
On one hand, DA and PA are metrics that are calculated primarily with the links that point to that page/domain.
Take a look at these resources:Domain Authority & Page Authority Metrics - Whiteboard Friday
What is Domain Authority? - Moz
What is Page Authority? - MozOn the other hand, a certain PA/DA doesn't assure nothing in Google SERPs. A PA of 25 may or may not be a "low" PA. There are lots of cases that have fewer PA/DA than their competitors and have better rankings.
In your case, I wouldn't worry much at all.Regarding the other matters:
- Domain change and 301 redirects. Yeap, it could affect some rankings, it was done too long ago to analyze its impact now.
- Links in OSE. Remember that Moz updates once a moth or so its link index and doesnt crawl the entire web, it may miss some of your links. My opinion: use other tools too (such as ahrefs.com, majestic.com or other).
- Words in descriptions. (Im asuming that you are referring to meta descriptions) There is no exact amout of words. Take a look at these resrouces:
New Title & Description Lengths for Google SEO in Search Results - Moz
Title Tag Length Guidelines: 2016 Edition - The SEMPOST Significant Change to SERPs: Google Extends Length of Titles and Descriptions - SEJ
Hope I've helped.
Best luck.
GR.
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 SEO for product categories and sub-categories
Hello everyone, We run a Magento store, and I have a general question about SEO-eCommerce. We recently launched a new site where we've modified the menu navigation for product categories. So let's say in the past we had a main category called 'Jackets' in the top navigation bar, and once you were on the jackets page you had a few subcategories to choose from. On the new site, we reworked the navigation bar in order to get our customers there in fewer clicks. So right away in the top bar, the customer can click 'Casual Jackets', 'Leather Jackets' and 'Winter Jackets'. We no longer have an internal link to the parent category 'Jackets'. Now here's the question:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yacpro13
-Do I 301 redirect 'jackets' to one of the sub-categories of my choosing?
or
-Do I keep the main category 'jackets' even though we don't actually link to it internally? I see pros and cons for both, and I'd like to proceed in the way that will be most beneficial from a rnakings point of view for all jackets categories. Thanks!0 -
Best way to link to 1000 city landing pages from index page in a way that google follows/crawls these links (without building country pages)?
Currently we have direct links to the top 100 country and city landing pages on our index page of the root domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
I would like to add in the index page for each country a link "more cities" which then loads dynamically (without reloading the page and without redirecting to another page) a list with links to all cities in this country.
I do not want to dillute "link juice" to my top 100 country and city landing pages on the index page.
I would still like google to be able to crawl and follow these links to cities that I load dynamically later. In this particular case typical site hiearchy of country pages with links to all cities is not an option. Any recommendations on how best to implement?0 -
How do we decide which pages to index/de-index? Help for a 250k page site
At Siftery (siftery.com) we have about 250k pages, most of them reflected in our sitemap. Though after submitting a sitemap we started seeing an increase in the number of pages Google indexed, in the past few weeks progress has slowed to a crawl at about 80k pages, and in fact has been coming down very marginally. Due to the nature of the site, a lot of the pages on the site likely look very similar to search engines. We've also broken down our sitemap into an index, so we know that most of the indexation problems are coming from a particular type of page (company profiles). Given these facts below, what do you recommend we do? Should we de-index all of the pages that are not being picked up by the Google index (and are therefore likely seen as low quality)? There seems to be a school of thought that de-indexing "thin" pages improves the ranking potential of the indexed pages. We have plans for enriching and differentiating the pages that are being picked up as thin (Moz itself picks them up as 'duplicate' pages even though they're not. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggiaco-siftery0 -
What to do when your home page an index for a series of pages.
I have created an index stack. My home page is http://www.southernwhitewater.com The home page is the index itself and the 1st page http://www.southernwhitewater.com/nz-adventure-tours-whitewater-river-rafting-hunting-fishing My home page (if your look at it through moz bat for chrome bar} incorporates all the pages in the index. Is this Bad? I would prefer to index each page separately. As per my site index in the footer What is the best way to optimize all these pages individually and still have the customers arrive at the top to a picture. rel= canonical? Any help would be great!! http://www.southernwhitewater.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VelocityWebsites0 -
Google Rich Snippets in E-commerce Category Pages
Hello Best Practice for rich snippets / structured data in ecommerce category pages? I put structured markup in the category pages and it seems to have negatively impacted SEO. Webmaster tools is showing about 2.5:1 products to pages ratio. Should I be putting structured data in category Pages at all? Thanks for your time 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
Pages Disappearing from Search
Hi, We have had a strongly ranking site since 2004. Over the past couple of days, our Google traffic has dropped by around 20% and some of our strong pages are completely disappearing from the rankings. They are still indexed, but having ranked number 1 are nowhere to be found. A number of pages still remain intact, but it seems they are increasingly disappearing. Where should we start to try and find out what is happening? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonukss0 -
Removing Low Rank Pages Help Others Shine?
Good Morning! I have a handful of pages that are not ranking very well, if at all. They are not driving any traffic, and are realistically just sorta "there". I have already determined I will not be bringing them over to our new web redesign. My question, could it be in our best interest to try and save these pages with ZERO traction and optimize them? Re-purpose them? Or does having them on our site currently muddy up our other pages? Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Better to optimize page, post or category in WordPress
Hello, This question is for the WordPress experts out there. I've always wondered if it is better for SEO to focus on a particular keyword by writing a page or a post dedicated to it. For example, if I want to rank high for the keyword "Seattle rocks", do you think I'd be better off writing a page titled "Seattle rocks" or a post titled "Seattle rocks". The ideal for me would be to create a category with the URL that includes that keyword for my WordPress blog, but I do not know if I can do a good job in terms of SEO optimizing the keyword. For instance, if we consider the keyword in the example above, I'd create a category which will have the following URL: http://www.seomozthebest.com/category/seattle-rocks Do you think I can still focus on that keyword having such URL? As you know, WordPress would allow me to write some text in the description tag, which will be visible on the site. I guess that I could use the description box to create some optimized content using the keyword "Seattle rocks" and then launch a link building campaign using the anchor text "Seattle rocks" directing to the URL: http://www.seomozthebest.com/category/seattle-rocks Do you think that I can optimize the keyword by creating a category? Thank you for reading such long question. I tried to be as clear as possible. Sal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0