If something is popular, would it be at the bottom?

Hi Will,

Personally, I approach this from two perspectives: Usability and SEO.

Usability: I don't think I've ever clicked on a footer sitemap myself when looking for things on a website. If organic search does not take me to what I want, I do a bit more browsing with a last ditch effort using the keyword search box. If that doesn't work, I bounce back to my organic search results and try another site or refine my search.

Therefore, I removed the footer sitemap from our ecommerce site and created a left nav link to additional categories. The link is above the fold and I call it "Additional Categories." I am shocked at the volume of visitors who go to that page - far more than every visited our footer sitemap.

SEO: In my opinion, a sitemap moves links up to the second tier click level because they are buried too deep and don't get the juice. These pages need to be moved up perhaps because the link structure and hierarchy are not sound or maybe it is just too big of a challenge to flatten out all portions of a site.

Therefore, I flatten out and improve the link structure (or as sound as you can get). If there are categories that warrant indexing, but are not best sellers, I put them on the additional categories page. If some of the categories are 3 clicks (sometimes 4) and difficult to flatten out or fix, I put them in the additional categories page so people can see them and spiders can crawl them. Our site currently does not have the authority to force the juice to deeper penetration.

Hi Guy. In terms of no-follow for page rank sculpting purposes, I've read the pros and cons of both and for me I've concluded I'd rather direct the juice where I want it to go rather than to block or prevent it from flowing where I don't want it to flow. No-follow can have unintended results, so I prefer the alternative.

Volume of categories and how to structure them is a challenge for a lot of ecommerce folks (me included). I've recently started flattening my site. While development of useful and intuitive sub-categories helps people find what they want on the 3rd or 4th click, crawl penetration suffers due to the depth. By flattening my site I mean reducing the number of sub-categories that can only be reached by other sub-categories - which is basically moving 3rd or 4th level categories up to the second level or top level (left nav).

A large and top ranking Toy Store I visit often to see how they structure their links has a top nav with categories, a left nav with categories and a sitemap in the footer. Each navigation entry has either different links in it or some different anchor text linking to the same pages. After much reading and apparent consensus among veteran users in this forum, I nixed the sitemap as unnecessary if I use good linking practice throughout the site. One Guru even suggested a sitemap can hurt your rankings if every page is linked to every other page with juice diminishing returns.

In my case, I created a left nav link to additional categories and put categories or sub-categories in them that were either: 1. Removed from the left nav because they were not important enough to be on the left nav 2. Removed from the left nav because on-page analytics suggested they didn't warrant being on the homepage. 3. Were a 3rd or 4th level category that on-page analytics showed there was enough demand to move its link to a second level or top level.

I hope this works for me and could of some help to you. Good luck.

If you're a manufacturer that sells products, I'm not going to link to you no matter how good your content and how many bells and whistles you've got for promotions. However, if you don't sell products and you've got better content than I can provide on my site, I will link to you. I link to manufacturer sites when they have authoritative information that is beyond the scope of information I provide. For example, flame resistant clothing or fire rating information. If I want to cover my bases (ass) and make sure the customer has access to deep level information that is beyond the scope of what is necessary for a purchase I will link to it on a case by case basis.

What's worse is paying a lot and getting nothing.

Thanks Dr. M. We are like a Home Depot, Ace Hardware, Target and Feed Store rolled into one and we rank well locally across the categories.

I'm inclined to believe you are correct in that signalling city keywords would not automatically or significantly diminish ranking outside the city.

However, considering the input from others, specifically the volume of search as found in Google Insights/AdWords etc. and the length of the title and how it affects the other keywords, I'm inclined to think I should take the local tag off of those products that don't need to be sold locally - and we can identify those pretty easily.

Would others agree? Thumbs up if I should take it off or thumbs down if I should leave it as it could only help and not hurt.

This thread still says answered and now its buried in the forum. I think we're done.

I'm still very curious about something more definitive on this before removing the local tags from national products.

Will do. Thanks Miriam.

Hi Miriam,

Is there any way to make this thread active again? Somehow it got answered - perhaps when you put a staff approval on Nick's response? I didn't tag it as answered as I'd like more input from others if possible.

As to your question(s):

We sell a lot  of products such as barn kits, lumber, timbers, fencing, hay, etc. that customers can pick up at the store or we can deliver within our state with our own delivery trucks. These products are primarily for in city/state customers that cannot be shipped via traditional carriers such as UPS.

When we got the site off the ground, I optimized those in-state "non-shippable" products with an Oklahoma City, Oklahoma tag in the title for a couple of reasons:

1. so local customers within the state will find it and buy it and

2. in order to get money rolling in rather quickly and it did (local optimization will do that).

As the site grew, I only put local tags on those products that were not shippable and took the local tag off the products we could ship out of state via commercial carriers (UPS, Post Office etc.).

Suggestions were made I should optimize locally for even more products (our horse tack for example). We live in a state called the "Quarter Horse Capital of the World" with lots of equine events, rodeos, Cowboy Hall of Fame etc. So I put local tags on all of our horse tack.

Thinking it wouldn't hurt anything, I put local tags on all of our products so anyone in Oklahoma looking for our products will find them. Whether there are 100 searches a month in Oklahoma for our term, or only 1- at least we'll rank for it.

Again, we rank very well locally for the vast majority of our terms. I'm just now beginning to wonder if this approach could backfire in any way regarding reach outside of our state.

We sell to people all over the US, so I'm inclined to think we're okay, but I'm not certain.

As we grow in authority and can rank for more keywords, I thought we could rein in the local tags and remove them as we won't need the localization as much since we'll rank better nationally with a more authoritative domain.

Is this a flawed approach?

Is localized optimization compromising our reach?

Does Google attribute less relevance to our titles for keyword queries that do not contain our city and state and therefor move others ahead of us?

Thank you.

Miriam, this is going to take some time so I will have to pick this up at home. In the meantime, feel free visit our store.

Thanks.

I'm a bit confused now. My question is: if "localized" optimization will inadvertently affect our keyword rankings outside of our city/state?

If a keyword query does not include our city or state, would Google interpret our titles as less relevent and therefore move other results ahead of ours?"

Nakul, what are you saying?

Hi Nakul,

Yes - the whole address is in the footer

Roughly 1,700 products (not sure how many pages that is)

The majority (probably not all) have the city/state target in the title

As far as Geo data is concerned, if I understand you correctly, Analytics Sources organic search and search engine optimization  queries show keywords with and without the city and or state. The overwhelming majority of keywords shown with city or state include the store's name. This store has been here 20 years.

I submitted to Dmoz but I can't find us on it.

Thanks Nicholas. Sorry, I'm not familiar with the x-pack. What is that - the top 7 or so local listings that appear before the organic search results?

Also, when doing keyword research, should I include the city/state in the keyword?

Should this keyword search be done in AdWords or somewhere else such as Google Insights?

Sorry for the barrage of questions.

I use our city/state in the majority of our title tags and consequently we do very well locallly for the majority of terms on our ecommerce site.

I'm wondering however, if this "localized" optimization will inadvertently affect our keyword rankings outside of our city/state?

If a keyword query does not include our city or state, would Google interpret our titles as less relevent and therefore move other results ahead of ours?

The city/state is last in the string on the title:

Blue Widgets - Our Company in City, State

Thanks for any insight.