No-Indexing on Ecommerce site
-
Hi
Our site has a lot of similar/lower quality product pages which aren't a high priority - so these probably won't get looked at in detail to improve performance as we have over 200,000 products .
Some of them do generate a small amount of revenue, but an article I read suggested no-indexing pages which are of little value to improve site performance & overall structure.
I wanted to find out if anyone had done this and what results they saw? Will this actually improve rankings of our focus areas?
It makes me a bit nervous to just block pages so any advice is appreciated
-
Do you have traffic data for any of these pages? If they're landing pages and garner clicks then obviously you'll want to keep them indexed.
The revenue you're receiving from these pages could be due to users navigating to them from brand pages, product categories, menus, or it could be cross-selling, etc.
I would say consolidate as many as you can for UX purposes so a customer doesn't have to click off of the page for another color or size.
-
Hi,
Yes it's more than 20%.
The products are a combination of products we've had to take from sister companies, the content isn't duplicate, but I wouldn't say it's high quality or optimised.
The other kind is products with duplicate into on our own site, some of these ideally need to be merged onto one product page - but this is a big dev project I don't have much control of at the moment.
When disallowing by Robots.txt, the only issue I have is I would have to manually add URLs, as we don't have sub-categories in our URLs.
Thank you for your suggestions - these are really helpful. Is there a preferred option for SEO?
Even with moving products down on the product listings - these will still be crawled so does this help tidy the technical structure in anyway?
Thank you
-
Hi Becky,
I have a few questions:
- How many is a lot? More than 20%?
- What does "lower quality products" mean? Do you have products with duplicated content which can be found also in another ecommerce sites? Or do you have (near) duplicates within your website?
- And, how many visitors did come to that product pages from the search engines? Can you exclude them without big consequences?
Probably, using of the noindex won't have positive impact on the rankings for more important pages. The noindexed pages will be still crawled and they will get a link juice.
Disallow by robots.txt could be better solution. But it seems to be very complicated.
Try to consider these solutions:
- Solution 1: Move lower quality product to the end of the product listing. Important products should be in the beginning.
- Solution 2: Exclude products from the product listing. You can keep it in database, findable by internal search.
- Solutions 3: Merge similar products, use only one URL. If products have another feature like color, user would choose it by select box.
- Solutions 4: Choose one main product and similar products can be used as "sub products" (check image with the example below)
Jan.
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
-
No Index Question
Hello, We are attempting to have the following page removed from Google search results: view-source:http://www.mndaily.com/1998/04/08/missing-student-has-disappeared A noindex tag was added but we aren't sure if it was done correctly. I'm wondering if there are any experts here that might be able to confirm that this was added correctly and will result in the removal of the page from search results. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasonMPLS0 -
SEO - is it site or page
Hi When we're talking about SEO does the search engine only look at the whole site in general or do they look at the individual page when we're talking about SERP? So if you have a keyword "my search term" Does the search engine look at the site first or the page with the term on then rank you or is it the page then the site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Why isn't my site being indexed by Google?
Our domain was originally pointing to a Squarespace site that went live in March. In June, the site was rebuilt in WordPress and is currently hosted with WPEngine. Oddly, the site is being indexed by Bing and Yahoo, but is not indexed at all in Google i.e. site:example.com yields nothing. As far as I know, the site has never been indexed by Google, neither before nor after the switch. What gives? A few things to note: I am not "discouraging search engines" in WordPress Robots.txt is fine - I'm not blocking anything that shouldn't be blocked A sitemap has been submitted via Google Webmaster Tools and I have "fetched as Google" and submitted for indexing - No errors I've entered both the www and non-www in WMT and chose a preferred There are several incoming links to the site, some from popular domains The content on the site is pretty standard and crawlable, including several blog posts I have linked up the account to a Google+ page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jtollaMOT0 -
Is this site worth subscribing to?
Hi everyone is, the below site worthwhile submitting to? I see one of our competitors is on here and the article they have published has in turn be picked up by other sites. Is the financial cost worth the back link reward? https://app.prweb.com/Main.aspx?Entity=Home
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hardley10 -
Why does a site have no domain authority?
A website was built and launched eight months ago, and their domain authority is 1. When a site has been live for a while and has such a low DA, what's causing it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | optimalwebinc0 -
I have a general site for my insurance agency. Should I create niche sites too?
I work with several insurance agencies and I get this questions several times each month. Most agencies offer personal and business insurance and in a certain geographic location. I recommend creating a quality general agency site but would they have more success creating other nice sites as well? For example, a niche site about home insurance and one about auto insurance. What would your recommendation be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lagunaitech1 -
Strange situation - Started over with a new site. WMT showing the links that previously pointed to old site.
I have a client whose site was severely affected by Penguin. A former SEO company had built thousands of horrible anchor texted links on bookmark pages, forums, cheap articles, etc. We decided to start over with a new site rather than try to recover this one. Here is what we did: -We noindexed the old site and blocked search engines via robots.txt -Used the Google URL removal tool to tell it to remove the entire old site from the index -Once the site was completely gone from the index we launched the new site. The new site had the same content as the old other than the home page. We changed most of the info on the home page because it was duplicated in many directory listings. (It's a good site...the content is not overoptimized, but the links pointing to it were bad.) -removed all of the pages from the old site and put up an index page saying essentially, "We've moved" with a nofollowed link to the new site. We've slowly been getting new, good links to the new site. According to ahrefs and majestic SEO we have a handful of new links. OSE has not picked up any as of yet. But, if we go into WMT there are thousands of links pointing to the new site. WMT has picked up the new links and it looks like it has all of the old ones that used to point at the old site despite the fact that there is no redirect. There are no redirects from any pages of the old to the new at all. The new site has a similar name. If the old one was examplekeyword.com, the new one is examplekeywordcity.com. There are redirects from the other TLD's of the same to his (i.e. examplekeywordcity.org, examplekeywordcity.info), etc. but no other redirects exist. The chances that a site previously existed on any of these TLD's is almost none as it is a unique brand name. Can anyone tell me why Google is seeing the links that previously pointed to the old site as now pointing to the new? ADDED: Before I hit the send button I found something interesting. In this article from dejan SEO where someone stole Rand Fishkin's content and ranked for it, they have the following line: "When there are two identical documents on the web, Google will pick the one with higher PageRank and use it in results. It will also forward any links from any perceived ’duplicate’ towards the selected ‘main’ document." This may be what is happening here. And just to complicate things further, it looks like when I set up the new site in GA, the site owner took the GA tracking code and put it on the old page. (The noindexed one that is set up with a nofollowed link to the new one.) I can't see how this could affect things but we're removing it. Confused yet? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
Duplicate content on ecommerce sites
I just want to confirm something about duplicate content. On an eCommerce site, if the meta-titles, meta-descriptions and product descriptions are all unique, yet a big chunk at the bottom (featuring "why buy with us" etc) is copied across all product pages, would each page be penalised, or not indexed, for duplicate content? Does the whole page need to be a duplicate to be worried about this, or would this large chunk of text, bigger than the product description, have an effect on the page. If this would be a problem, what are some ways around it? Because the content is quite powerful, and is relavent to all products... Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creode0