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If I have an eCommerce website containing 10,000 product pages and then I add 10,000 new product pages using a bulk upload (with limited/basic but unique content), does this pose any SEO risk?

I am obviously aware of the risks of adding a large number of low quality content to the website, which is not the case here, however what I am trying to ascertain is whether simply doubling the number of pages in itself causes any risk to our SEO efforts? Does it flag to the Search Engines that something "spammy" is happening (even if its not)

Sounds very much like this fairly large change may be attributed to the alteration of your URL structure/process

Its weird that the number of pages has dropped, so it might be worth logging into Google WebMaster Tools and looking at the "Blocked resources" tab or using the robots.txt checker to see if you are preventing spiders from crawling your website (maybe the script you've added is blocking the search engines)

While you in GMT it is also worth looking at your inbound links to ensure these aren't spammy and double check that you haven't got any Manual webspam warnings (unlikely to be this but worth checking)

Hi Yusuf

Yes. Website B will now offer the same product as website A. Website A would also have repeat visitors.

Do you then think it would be a better bet to create a page on website B instead explaining that Website A is no longer in operation and redirect to this? I guess this may bring in branded traffic to website A using website Bs brand name?

Hi guys

Quick question about 301 redirection between domains.

I currently manage a website, lets call it website A.

Website A sells a particular product range, however the decision has been made by the powers that be to pull the plug on the business and sell the products previously sold via Website A via another website within the parent companies control.....lets call it Website B.

I need to make it clear to customers of Website A that the company no longer operates but want to pass the SEO equity that has been built up over time to the relevant pages on Website B.

My plan was to

1. 301 Redirect all key landing pages on Website A to the most relevant pages on Website B

2. Initially keep the website A homepage live but change the message to say "Website A no longer operates, but Website B can help etc. etc."  Remove all sub links from navigation.

3. Monitor referral and direct traffic levels and consider 301 redirecting website A homepage to Website B homepage in the long term.

My questions:

• Does this sound like the best approach? If not, what alternatives are there?
• Will Website A look like a link farm for Website B? I dont want this obviously!

I am considering moving 1 of our sites to a Magento e-commerce platform. If I went down this route we would be keen to find someone who we can hire in-house.

However I have never hired a web developer before. What should a developer with experience of launching and building Magento-based e-commerce websites have on their CV? What should I be looking for in terms of knowledge?

Any help or advice welcome!

Hi guys

I set up a website about 8 months back with the intention to bring in visitors who were after DIY advice & product reviews. To start it was bringing in decent levels of traffic. However since the Google Algorthym updates around October-time the levels of traffic have noticeably nose dived.

if you're on your lunch break and have 5 mins to hand I'd really appreciate any advise you guys have on how to rescue this trend. Here's the website in question: www.diyu.co.uk

Any constructive feedback welcome Thanks in advance

Thanks Mike. It certainly sounds like moving all SKUs onto 1 page is preferable. I suspect that I may need to spend a bit of dosh getting the website's on-page structure amended if going down this approach.

With regards to point 1,  I assume the pages will still be crawled but any link equity would be passed to the canonicalised version of the page?

Thanks for the advice guys.

What do you think of Takeshi's advice below regarding adding canonical link to product page that points to a product category page

I.e. we have 20 of the same jumpers of different sizes, colours. A canonical tag is added to the product page that points to a parent page for the jumper, rather than the specific product page.

Thanks Takeshi - this approach sounds like something I can implement sooner rather than later.

Have you had success using it?

Thanks Mike - this certainly makes sense.

My product pages do not currently change the URL parameters depending ont he product sku the visitor changes , but the approach you've taken sounds perfect for your setup

Hi guys

Just keen to gauge your opinion on a quandary that has been bugging me for a while now.

I work on an ecommerce website that sells around 20,000 products.

A lot of the product SKUs are exactly the same in terms of how they work and what they offer the customer. Often it is 1 variable that changes. For example, the product may be available in 200 different sizes and 2 colours (therefore 400 SKUs available to purchase).

Theese SKUs have been uploaded to the website as individual entires so that the customer can purchase them, with the only difference between the listings likely to be key signifiers such as colour, size, price, part number etc.

Moz has flagged these pages up as duplicate content.

Now I have worked on websites long enough now to know that duplicate content is never good from an SEO perspective, but I am struggling to work out an effective way in which I can display such a large number of almost identical products without falling foul of the duplicate content issue.

If you wouldnt mind sharing any ideas or approaches that have been taken by you guys that would be great!

when this happens try appending /logout to the end of the moz URL -(i.e. http://moz.com/logout) this should help you to reload the main page again and then you can login as usual

Thanks Chris - yes I saw this and it was certainly very valuable. Was just keen to hear from any individuals responsible for UK based websites, as a lot of the tools & techniques were US based.

Hi Wiqas - I am just after any useful tools that can help to me to identify actions for local SEO

Hi guys

I'm looking for any recommendations for local SEO tools in the UK? I keep stumbling across a variety of different tools but they all seem to cater for the US market only.

Any tools or tips would be greatly received!

Sounds like you have been 100% validated in your decision to change SEO firm! Just imagine the tactics they were using when you were paying them

I would echo the comments above - stay vigilant for spammy link warning within Google Webmaster Tools and add any poor quality links that you find to a disavow file.

Its staggering that your old agency would rather put time, money & effort into harming an old client rather than finding a new one

Thanks Jesse - I was after a more accurate overview of the popular website visitor hours. The custom report that Guillermo has provided below seems to be just right. Thanks for your help though!

This is great - thanks Guillermo!

Just a quickie....

I know that this was possible in the previous incarnation of Google Analytics, but I cant fathom how to do to it now on the most recent version.

How can I see when the mos popular visitor times were on my website? I.e. a graph that shows a 24 hour clock over any given time frame

Thanks guys - I'll keep persevering. Hopefully I'll sort this out shortly!

Thanks for your help guys.

The sitemap.txt file I have created uses the correct approach as listed by Google on this page - it isn't just a list of links in a Wordpad file:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80472?hl=en

I am just trying to eastablish how to convert it to an XML file. When I change the file extension it seems to break and when I export from MS Word it doesnt seem to like the parameter

Didn't think this would be so difficult!

I have created a sitemap file as per Google Web Master Tools instructions. I have it saved as a .txt file.

Am I right in thinking that this needs to be uploaded as a .xml file?

If so, how do I convert this to a XML? I have tried but it seems to corrupt - there must be a simple way to do this?!

If you have a /index page, I assume it would be beneficial to 301 redirect this to the root domain?

Thanks Travis - I think your 100% correct in saying that for eCommerce websites it is imperative to ensure the website structure is setup correctly to ensure that product pages can benefit from as much exposure as possible.

Where you say breadcrumbs are important , do you mean introducing DoFollow breadcrumb links to the top of each category or product page?

Hi folks

I am responsible for an e-commerce website. Our website is doing very well but I believe that our product pages should be ranking more highly than they currently are.

When taking over my current role, it became clear that a number of changes would need to be made to try and boost the under performing product pages. Amongst other things I therefore implemented the following:

1. New Product content - we have placed a massive focus on reworking all product content so that it is unique and offers value to the reader. The new content includes videos, images and text that is all keyword rich but (I hope) not seen as overly spammy.
2. Duplicate content - the CMS was creating multiple versions of the same page - I addressed this by implementing 301 redirects and adding canonical links. This ensures there is now only 1 version of the page
3. Parameters - I instructed Google to not index certain URLs containing specific parameters
4. Internal links - I have tried to improve the number of links to the products from relevant key category pages

My question is, although some of the changes have only been in place for a month, what else can I do to ensure that the product pages rank as highly as possible. As an e-commerce website with so many products it is very difficult to link to these product pages directly, so any tips or suggestions would be welcome!

Here's an example of a product page link :

http://www.directheatingsupplies.co.uk/pid_37440/100180/Worcester-Greenstar-29CDi-Classic-Gas-Combi-Boiler-7738100216-29-Cdi.aspx

Hi there - I have just been told that it is a big "no no" to add authorship to a standard page and that it should only be used on blog posts. Is this true?

What are the negative effects of using authorship on a page?

I added the rel="author" tag to a page that talks about a member of our team and a few weeks ago his picture started showing next to the search results entry on Google - great for click through rate, however is this improper usage?

Any help welcome!

That's a No then?

Ok great, sounds like we all seem to agree on the fact that syndicating content is not a great idea.

Away from this, is the idea of writing a guest post for them (1 that is clearly introduced as from ourselves) a bad one? Surely this would be a good opportunity to build some links to my website and (being a popular website) drive some traffic as part of the same process.

Thanks Alan - I was thinking it would be a better solution to propose that a unique article is written by us for them to use on their website (with deep links pointing back at my website).

What do you think?

I have been approached by a website (domain authority 65, homepage authority 70, linking domains 415) that syndicates other website's content.

They are keen to promote one of my existing articles on their website and are in a similar subject niche .

My immediate reaction was "No", as I am keen to avoid any negative impact on our SEO-efforts that may be created through having my content duplicated on another website.

I am just looking from the feedback from the rest of the community as to what their thoughts are - does the potential benefit of driving visitors from a popular website outweigh the fact that our own article may not rank very well organically as it has been duplicated.

I think the fact that we have been approached regarding the syndication suggests that the website in question is not a spammy "scraper" website that activity looks to employ black hat techniques, but I don't want to risk effecting my organic SERP ranking.

Thoughts?

I am building a new website and I plan to 301 Redirect my Old Domain (olddomain.com) to a brand new Domain (newdomain.com) in the upcoming months.

To do this I was planning to update the htaccess file on both the old and new domains.

The htaccess file on the old domain would look to 301 redirect all pages on the old domain to the new domain. The htaccess file on the new domain would detail any specific URL redirects I want to implement (ie. olddomain.com/EXAMPLE/TEST will redirect to newdomain/TEST) - this will ensure link equity is retained and bounce rates are kept at a lower level.

Does this sound like the right approach?

Also, what do I need to do with the old domain going forward? Do I need to keep this forever in order for the 301 redirect to work or can I eventually just forward the domain to the new one permanently?

I am aware that Google's Penguin 2.0 update is looking to tackle the increasing numbers of links from poor quality websites & blogs.

The advice since Penguin 1.0 has been to create a natural backlink profile, ensuring that there is a balance between keywords-rich anchor text and brand terms.

I tend to link using Branded anchor text to the homepage of my website and use keyword anchor text sparingly to link to subpages/categories elsewhere on my website.

My question is what exactly is too much in terms of anchor text? If for example I have 5 or 6 keyword-rich links inbound to a sub/category page, do I need to also get some brand anchor text into these sub/category pages too?

You probably want to talk to the SEO Moz Support Team directly rather than the Q&A forums - sadly no power here!

This is correct - you are only supposed to have 1 x h1 tag on your page as this stipulates what the main header for your page is.

You could however mix it up with some h2 and h3 tags as it is ok to use multiple versions of these on any page....but use them in a hierachical order i.e. dont use h3 if you havent used h2 on the page, dont use h4 if you havent used a h2 & h3 etc.

I would say that you just need to add rel="canonical" to the on each page - this will tell Google to affectivley ignore all other variations of that URL.

You could also considering using Web Master Tools to advise the search engines to refrain from indexing all of the URLs with those specific parameters - just be careful though as giving the wrong parameter instruction could result in pages you DO want to be indexed being ignored or dropped out of the SERPs.

Why don't you consider looking outside of Mexico for some company websites elsewhere that are in a similar industry or about a similar subject matter. As long as the content is relevant in some way to both websites and holds unique value then it should be worth exploring in my opinion.

I personally try to ensure that my product pages are up to date and are showing up in Google Shopping and for specific product name searches.

I then try to gear my main category pages up for more generic key words searches so I can try and capture customers looking to browse at the first point of the buying cycle. Ideally you would capture everything but I guess if starting from a standing start you have to prioritise.

For reference, I initially prioritised the specific product pages over general category pages as these were more likely to bring in an immediate sale. If these product pages weren't ranking properly but generic broad searches were doing ok, people may do their research on my website but when it comes to buying would find one of my competitors.

I'm finding E-commerce SEO quite tough due to the broad amount of products we sell - its difficult to go after everything. I guess consistency and utilising white hat techniques on everything you do is the way forward.

I have just had a quick look at your back link profile using open site explorer and it appears that you haven't got a lot of inbound links using the terms you want to rank highly for (only pest control phoenix az  & pest control az have been picked up). Maybe address this by doing some guest blog posting .

It may also be worth creating some sub pages around your keyword focus and then targeting these rather than expecting the homepage to do everything (which is tough)

Thanks Istvan.

I've just spoken to Google help via their online Adwords Chat function (good tip there!) and they have provided me with information about setting up your products so that the SKUs are displayed depending on the terms the searcher uses:

http://support.google.com/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188494#other

For reference, you basically tag your 1 product page up and tell in the data feed within Google Merchant - this will in turn tell Google which variant URL to show to the browser based on things such as size, colour, weight etc. et.c

1 follow up question....do you know how this would work with regards to Google Shopping / Base?

If I followed the approach you have suggested would I be able to add each SKU as an individual item within Google shopping (ie. large red t-shirt,  medium red t-shirt, yellow medium t-shirt etc.) or would I only be able to promote the product page itself (containing all 24 SKUs - for example)?

Ok great - thanks for the great advice!

Thanks Istvan - so what would the customer be looking at when they view the SKU URL?

Is the image & text completely different or would you just change the picture & price (if applicable)...hope my question makes sense!

I manage an E-commerce website and we are looking to make some changes to our product pages to try and optimise them for search purposes and to try and improve the customer buying experience.

This is where my head starts to hurt!

Now, let's say I am selling a T shirt that comes in 4 sizes and 6 different colours. At the moment my website would have 24 products, each with pretty much the same content (maybe differing references to the colour & size).

My idea is to change this and have 1 main product page for the T-shirt, but to have 24 product SKU's/variations that exist to give the exact product details. Some different ways I have been considering to do this:

a) have drop-down fields on the product page that ask the customer to select their Tshirt size and colour. The image & price then changes on the page.

b) All product 24 product SKUs sre listed under the main product with the 'Add to Cart' open next to each one. Each one would be clickable so a page it its own right.

Would I need to set up a canonical links for each SKU that point to the top level product page?

I'm obviously looking to minimise duplicate content but Im not exactly sure on how to set this up - its a big decision so I need to be 100% clear before signing off on anything. .

Any other tips on how to do this or examples of good e-commerce websites that use product SKus well?

Kind regards

Tom

No the search engines are unable to distinguish that the pages are a guest post, for them it is just duplicate content.

You could of course try and rewrite your article, but search engines such as Google are getting better and better all the time so are increasingly able to see if you are just re-hashing an article.It's scary!

I guess the take home is to only produce unique content that offers real value to the web user.

I guess if you could host all your products at root level then this would be better....it just may be difficult to manage house keeping wise.

To avoid duplicate content I would specify that you don't have the same product page sitting in different categories.

Instead the product page should be the same URL even if it lives in multiple categories.e.g. www.example/product/luxim-FZ200.html

So if you click on the product link in Panasonic you go to the product page. You then go to the same page if you click on the product page from the "digital camera" category. The page is then unique and doesn't live in any category in particular.

You can then set the canonical link at product page level.

This would definitely be duplicate content.

Most blogs or websites that welcome guest blog posts stipulate that the content is unique for this very reason.

It has no unique value if it is across numerous websites, it is essentially the same as posting your article on an article distribution website (albeit to a lesser degree).

My tip is to have the article on 1 site only.