OK perfect, thank you
So the only way I'd have a problem, is if the redirects aren't in the htaccess file - which shouldn't happen, but i'll double check this.
Thank you
Becky
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OK perfect, thank you
So the only way I'd have a problem, is if the redirects aren't in the htaccess file - which shouldn't happen, but i'll double check this.
Thank you
Becky
Hi
Quick question on SEO & product pages.
We're changing suppliers, so discontinuing their range, adding new - but the products will be very similar - almost identical in some cases.
I don't want to lose authority built up from current product pages, the only way to reuse these pages is to reuse SKUs - which we can't do.
If I am redirecting these pages to new products which are similar, I know page authority will be passed - so is this the best option?
Our links on the website will actually point to the final URL, rather than going through a redirect - if this is the case will it still pass authority?
Thank you
Becky
Perfect, thanks for your feedback
We have third party, but I have seen sites which use both third party and google customer reviews.
The only thing I am unsure of is, if a customer gets sent 2 emails & ways of leaving feedback it may get confusing... will keep looking into it!
Do you have organisation schema or are you just focusing on the local listing?
Hi
We have a third party review provider, but were also looking at increasing our Google reviews.
However after more research, should Google reviews only be used on local listings?
For organisations which don't have a physical location to buy from - is the solution to use organisation schema, which incorporates 'reviews on other sites' with the hope Google may show your Feefo review count?
When checking similar companies - all seem to have the organisation knowledge card and not the local Google My Business listing.
Is it worth pursuing extra reviews on Google My Business or not?
Thanks!
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
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
Hi
This is really helpful thank you, I think at the moment I'd rather keep them from being crawled as the pages aren't helpful for crawlers. I will look into it in future if required.
Thanks very much!
Hi
I'm still stuck on the subject if SEO friendly facets.
Firstly, is it worth investing time in over things like SEO campaigns/content marketing as I'm the only one working on SEO and trying to prioritise all tasks
Can I set up facets so they are SEO friendly - should they simply be blocked? my concern is wasting crawl budget and duplicate pages.
Here's an example of a page on the site - https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/lift-tables
Here's an example of a facet URL - https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/lift-tables#facet:-1002779711011711697110,-700000000000001001651484832107103,-700000000000001057452564832109109&productBeginIndex:0&orderBy:5&pageView:list&
What would be the best course of action to take to make them SEO friendly?
Tips would be appreciated
Hi
We have automatically created brand pages based on which brand they have in their attributes.
At the moment, developers have restricted the ability to properly optimise these for SEO, but I also wanted to look at how we should handle pagination.
Example:
http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/manutan?page=1
http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/manutan?page=2
http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/manutan?page=3
Should we do any of the following - which I've found in an article:
Put no follow on all links located on pagination pages
Should we no index these pages as they are wasting crawl budget?
- Don’t show links to page 2, 3, 4, 5… 10, 11, 12… at the end of your content but only a link to the next and previous pages so that you won’t dilute your page authority.
Or does anyone else have any tips on how to handle these pages?
Thank you!
Hi
I'm checking the crawl depth report in SEM rush, and looking at pages which are 4+ clicks away.
I have a lot of product pages which fall into this category. Does anyone know the impact of this? Will they never be found by Google?
If there is anything in there I want to rank, I'm guessing the course of action is to move the page so it takes less clicks to get there?
How important is the crawl budget and depth for SEO? I'm just starting to look into this subject
Thank you
Ah, that makes complete sense thank you!
Hi
I have 2 issues appearing on my site audit, for a number of pages. I don't think I actually have an issue but just want to make sure.
Using this page as an example - http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/0-5-l-capacity-round-safety-can-149p210
The errors I get are:
1. Conflicting hreflang and rel=canonical Canonical page points to a different language URL - when using href & canonicals, it states I need a self referential canonical .
The page above is a SKU page, so we include a canonical back to the original model page so we don't get lots of duplicate content issues.
Our canonical will point to - http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/justrite-round-safety-cans
2. No self referencing hreflang.
Are these big issues? I'd think the bigger issue would be if I add self referencing canonicals and end up with lots of duplicate content.
Any advice would be much appreciated
This is really good to know, so thank you for all the information!
Really interesting about the Theo Paphitis competition I hadn't heard of this, but amazing promotion!
How many people do you have helping with content? Does everyone pitch in or do you have a content team?
It's not so much managing the posts, but getting the resource to produce good content. I can do some but probably not enough to post regularly.
How do you find LinkedIn?
Hi
I'm working on an SEO campaign in relation to vacuum cleaners. I'm working on some outreach and as we focus on B2B I'm finding it difficult to find blogs which are B2B focused.
We would ideally want customers who are buying a number of vacuums for their business - but it could be any industry.
Instead of B2B blogs, I have gone with the angle of cleaning/organising blogs, with lots of followers on social.
However, does anyone know of any good B2B blogs they could recommend? I'm looking for something written by facilities/buildings managers - if blogs like this exist
Thank you
Hi
Does anyone have any good articles or case studies on how SEO/Social compliment each other?
I know the benefits, I just need something tangible to show management, which justifies me spending more time on it. I currently do a lot of onsite SEO, but I know we're missing the content marketing/social media aspect and it's something I want to push.
Any help would be great
Becky
This is really helpful thank you.
Do you find it's helped your traffic & SEO as well? How many people do you have managing your channels or do you use an agency?
I love the angle for the content you create, do you get your inspiration from anywhere?
Hi,
Wondered if anyone has any useful articles or tips for social media for a B2B generalist ecommerce site.
We have started thinking about LinkedIn, but I know we need a lot more work & potentially to look at other channels/building a brand/personality online.
I've read a few articles, about finding the unboring angle of your business - I'm just wondering how we can achieve this if we have thousands of products & potential customers - it's hard to know where to start & to get the buy in
It's something I want to push, so any tips would be great
Hi
Yes it bounced back a little, not a huge amount however!
Hi
Quick question on arrangement of keywords in titles. I know the order isn't so important anymore, but would there be a real issue if I want to rank for 'Henry Xtra' but my title reads 'Numatic Henry Xtra Vacuum Cleaner'
Rather than 'Henry Xtra Vacuum Cleaner' ??
Will it really make much difference?
Thank you!
Hi
I wondered if there had been any other insights since March about the Fred update or any other Google update?
I don't think we were hit by Fred but in March we dropped out for a lot of keyword rankings, I just cannot pinpoint why.
We are an ecommerce site, so some of our product/category pages don't have a huge amount of written content.
We might have a couple of extra backlinks to disavow, but nothing major.
Does anyone else have any insights?
Thanks!
Hi
It's actually worked for us on certain pages, I don't like to just throw content under a tab on the page, but for now it's helping whilst we work on the design of the pages.
I think they need improvement from a UX perspective still but for now it's helping.
Thanks!
Hi
Can anyone recommend any tools for understanding how people interact with a page?
We use events in analytics and have previously used hot jar. I didn't know if there were any new ones?
Thanks!
Hi Robert
Thank you for the reply. We do include mark up, H1's etc, but as some of our categories are so competitive, it is a struggle to rank for example, a level 3 > http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/mesh-office-chairs
This is a lower level category page, we need to mark this up with product listing schema, but each product page has schema.
I am working on adding some content to this page, but other than that - I am finding it difficult to do anything else on page to help improve SEO visibility? Are there any suggestions?
I am also working on user guides - but then this could potentially rank above the category page - and wouldn't convert but help more with research/brand awareness.
Thank you
Becky
Thank you for your input totally agree
Did the new menu work better from a UX point of view?
I just need to make sure I get my point across with as much back up as possible, so if things don't go well, I can say I told you so, not in so many words..
Thanks!
Hi Robert,
Thank you for getting back to me. We break our structure down, so there won't be masses of products under the main categories, it will be split into subcategories & then split down again to level 3 subcategories. Yes those categories you mentioned are on site.
We don't show the level 3 subcategories in the menu as they haven't given us functionality to do so, but when you click through they will be shown on another landing page. This does make it more difficult for us to rank these level 3 pages and they tend to get lower rankings/traffic than the level 2 subcategories.
Whichever option we choose will be tested, I am just concerned from an SEO point of view, if I remove all the current subcategories from the menu, will the rankings be affected long term?
Can you ever rank a subcategory well if it's not linked from the homepage? Surely if the subcategory is another click away from the homepage & only linked from the main category page, rather than the homepage, authority will be diluted making it that bit harder?
I know UX is a big factor, but my worry is until we go live and test it we won't know and the damage to SEO will already be done. So I need to put forward my views first.
Thank you
Hi
Our Dev team have updated our website with a new menu structure, they have given us 2 options to choose from.
1st option I think is better for SEO - this will be showing top 8 categories and then subcategories once you hover over category 1. Not much change from our current structure, just a slightly different layout.
(I have added an image example of what option1 will look like)
2nd option - is preferred by management - shows all 24 categories & no subcategories.
My question is, will removing the current subcategories from the main menu make them lose rankings & make them harder to rank in future? I'm guessing everything will move down a level in the structure and lost page authority...
Does anyone have any articles/case studies to prove this point?
Any help is much appreciated
Becky
Hi
We have 2 H1's on this page http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/heavy-duty-shelving
Our webmaster has put one as display:none - but isn't this just going to look like we're keyword spamming & trying to hide it?
OK now I;m looking I am seeing more wrong with this page...
The width buttons at the top as h2's...& they link to facet pages? Won't this just waste crawl budget?
and every product title/user guide title etc are all H2's.... I just need to put a plan together to give to our dev team on what should be updated
Any tips would be great.
Becky
Hi,
Thank you for the response.
The irish site isn't managed very well, but I'll review the french - dev team are based in France and this is why.
I am going to look at the content and backlinks, at the moment the onsite content is my focus, but I am trying to think of valuable content for readers.
I have been working on user guides, but ultimately this doesn't help rankings of pages which convert highly.
I'd like to improve rankings of category pages, but as these contain product listings, there isn't much appetite for showing content other than products...
Hi
Just to jump in on this, the site I work on hasn't transitioned to full https yet, but the login, basket & payment pages are all https.
What is your view on this? I;m aware we need to transition the whole site, but I need to push this with the dev team at our parent company.
Thanks
Becky
Hi Moz
I work on an ecommerce site & am getting stuck with how to improve rankings on category pages.
I have a competitor who writes loads of content for their category pages under tabs & they perform very well. The content isn't particularly helpful, more about their range and what they offer.
I have tested adding similar content under a tab to some of our category pages - with some performing well & others not as well.
I know this isn't ideal, and I'd like some help with an alternative. Does anyone have tips on improving rankings on category pages? I don't have much control on the layout, this is controlled by our parent company which restricts us.
I am researching writing user guides, but these will be on other pages not directly on the category page & the way we have to add them is a lot of manual work for our webmaster, so I can't get them up as quickly as I'd like.
I have seen REI have a small bit of content at the top of their pages that link to guides e.g - https://www.rei.com/c/static-and-rescue-ropes
But obviously their domain authority is so high already, that they don't need as much help as me
At the moment I have some new Chair pages I need to rank, these are competitive and any ideas would be great
Here are some examples:
Thank you!
Hi
I have the same issue. I have an ecommerce competitor who writes loads of content for their category pages, under tabs & they perform very well. The content isn't particularly helpful, more about their range and what they offer.
I work on an ecommerce site, and I have tested adding content to some of these category pages - with some performing better than others
But if an ecommerce site is expected to have thin content on these category pages then what can we do to help them rank? I don't have much control over the layout of the page, this is controlled more by our parent company.
Any tips for improving rankings of these category pages?
Hi
Thank you, is it such a bad thing for a product page to rank over a category page? Ultimately we want to give the customer a choice of products if the term they've used is broad enough.
For something like 'Folding Sack Trucks,' I'd prefer a category page to rank, but there aren't many long tail search terms we could use on product pages for this keyword, so how can you avoid targeting 'folding sack trucks' on product pages selling this just in slightly different variations?
I mean in terms of content the category pages are 'thin' as the company want to list the products available without putting lots of content to distract the customer...
Thanks
Hi
Yes I have just checked some of these and it seems that I now have product pages ranking instead of category pages.
With some many products which are very similar, I'm not even sure where to start with this?!
Thank you for highlighting it
Hi
In March I've seen a lot of keywords go from being ranked, to dropping out completely. We usually get under 1000 drop in and out each month, but 2,500 dropped out this month.
Some are not focus keywords I'd be concerned about, but then some are....
I am trying to work out why and could use some help.
We haven't changed anything on the pages & here are some examples:
These pages do still rank for other keywords, so aren't out of Google completely.
I'm just trying to identify if we have any other issues
Thank you
Hey,
Yes sorry you've lost me!
I've seen a lot of backlinks from one of our sister companies in March, they are no follow, but they're footer links - would this have any impact?
Thanks!
Hi
Thanks for the reply. I haven't seen huge traffic drops, it's more than a lot of keywords have dropped out of rankings, but I think it was for pages which don't rank highly anyway.
It just seems to coincide with a domain authority drop as well.
I'm keeping up to date with it but can't find anything concrete on whats affected us
Thanks
Hi Moz!
I've seen a big drop in Domain Authority 31 > 22 recently.
I need a plan of what to sort out first, here are the points I know we need to improve:
This is our site http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/
I am the only SEO, with a small content team - who only really work on adding new products to the site. Our dev team are in France and we can be restricted by them.
But I'm worried & I need a plan of what to tackle first to help improve this.
We also saw keywords drop out in March - I'm assuming after Fred, some keywords aren't ones I would worry about, but then some are - for example -
http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/dollies-load-movers-door-skates this page ranked at position 6 for Dollies - now dropped out altogether.
Any ideas are welcome - help
Hi
I'm trying to review pages which have previously ranked, but in March have dropped out completely.
Some of these pages I can see have dropped to having a Page Authority of 1, we haven't changed anything on these pages, so is there a reason why the authority has dropped? These pages only had around 8 - 10 Page Authority to begin with.
I'm trying to identify why we have lost keywords, and if it has anything to do with the Google Updates in March
Here are examples of the pages with drops:
http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/heavy-duty-shelving-1830x1830mm-blue-orange
http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/metal-feet-for-heavy-duty-steel-shelving
http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/health-and-safety-law-poster-a2
Thank you!
Hi
Thank you for your response - we're currently running an AB test which is why you get to this URL, the main homepage is http://www.key.co.uk/en/key without the B & before I started working here, the site structure was developed by our parent company in France
Would you say this is still an issue?
I know we need to add quality content, videos, quality backlinks etc - I'm just trying to prioritise and at the moment it is just me doing SEO with 20,000 products, so you never feel like you're getting anywhere.
Thank you for your help! x
Hi
I've seen a couple areas of our site drop in average rankings for some areas since the 'Fred' update. We don't have ads on our site, but I'm wondering if it's 'thin' content - http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/
We are an ecommerce site and we have some content on our category pages - which is a bit more generic about the section/products within that section - but how can it not be if it's a category page with products on?
I am working on adding topic based content/user guides etc to be more helpful for customers, but I'd love some advice on generating traffic to category pages.
Is it better to rank these other topic/user guide pages instead of the category page & then hope the customer clicks through to products?
Advice welcome
Hi
Thanks for the input, I will review the pages and put a plan in place - I think it's something I will test first to see what impact it has.
Thank you
Hi
Yes we do have this for our main product image already, the missing ones are mainly for additional images which need to be more descriptive and not duplicate of the product name. I'll see if there is anything they can come up with, but unfortunately it won't be priority for them.
Thanks
Hi,
I guess in the grand scheme of things, is it worth while to allocate time to 22,000 alt tags? over something else for SEO?
Thank you
Hi
We have lots of alt tags missing, I know they'e recommended by Google, so moving forward we will ensure we add them to product images, but should we go back and update the ones we have missing?
How important is it for SEO? Has anyone tested this?
Thanks
Hi
Thanks for your input
I hadn't seen that article! I have a competitor doing it who seem to rank really well, despite the fact they don't have great backlinks, the only thing I can see they're doing is tabbed content. So I've tried it for a few pages and it seems to be helping.
Do you think think interaction with the tabbed content could affect how Google ranks the page? So if no one clicks on the tab, it may be ignored?
Would love to know everyone's thoughts on the mobile/desktop question you raised too
Thanks!
Hi
We have reviews on our product pages & service reviews on Feefo, but how important is it to also drive customers to review your company on Google?
I'm guessing we should be doing both, but it proves difficult when you already ask them to review your company through a third party?
Any tips moz?
Hi
Thanks for this
Yes we have added negatives, our brand name is Key Industrial, but we also target 'Key' which is obviously very broad.
Haven't checked Google trends - I'll do that now!
Thanks!