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I have been trying to find any case studies of people who have optimized images for SEO for their e-commerce website, but haven't been able to find any case study, indicating obtained results. I am wondering how much increase in Google Image search traffic others have been able to obtain when optimizing their e-commerce images for image SEO. I need this information to justify development resources needed for for example an image sitemap, changes to file names and alt texts, title tags and possibly EXIF data. File size is already ok. Hope someone has experience with this and can share some results.  Also, would be great if Moz would do a Whiteboard Friday about this 🙂 (hint!).

Hi everyone, I've been searching about a problem, but haven't been able to find an answer. We would like to generate a XML site map for an international web shop. This shop has one domain for Dutch visitors (.nl) and another domain for visitors of other countries (Germany, France, Belgium etc.) (.com). The website on the 2 domains looks the same, has the same template and same pages, but as it is targeted to other countries, the pages are in different languages and the urls are also in different languages (see example below for a category bags). Example Netherlands:
Dutch domain: www.client.nl 
Example Dutch bags category page: www.client.nl/tassen Example France:
International domain: www.client.com 
Example French bags category page: www.client.com/sacs When a visitor is on the Dutch domain (.nl) which shows the Dutch content, he can switch country to for example France in the country switch and then gets redirected to the other, international .com domain. Also the other way round. Now we want to generate a XML sitemap for these 2 domains. As it is the same site, but on 2 domains, development wants to make 1 sitemap, where we take the Dutch version with Dutch domain as basis and in the alternates we specify the other language versions on the other domain (see example below). <loc>http://www.client.nl/tassen</loc>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="fr"
href="http://www.client.com/sacs"
/></xhtml:link<br> Is this the best way to do this? Or would we need to make 2 site maps, as it are 2 domains?

One of our clients is a lingerie retailer, that also sells swimwear and nightwear. They have a webshop, with landing pages such as /lingerie, /swimwear and /nightwear (only in Dutch). The nightwear page is doing ok (#5 in Google NL), but for the swimwear and lingerie pages, something strange has happened and I have no clue what it is. On May 7, the /swimwear page ranked 24 for swimwear in Google NL. In that period, the homepage was ranking at #40-50. One week later, on May 14, the homepage was ranked 24 for swimwear, and the /swimwear page was nowhere to be found. The homepage is currently ranking 17/18 for swimwear. Something similar seems to have happened for lingerie. The homepage was ranking at around 11-13 for a few weeks in April/May, the /lingerie page was ranking at 8 in May, and then after the 4th of June, both the homepage and the /lingerie page no longer seem to have any decent rank for lingerie. So, trying to find the problem: I checked the Moz On-Page Grader for all three pages/keywords. All pages get an A. Robots.txt hardly contains anything, and there's no robots meta tag to block the page. Checked Google Webmaster Tools just in case, nothing out of the ordinary. The page contains 342 URL's which is a lot, but that shouldn't be too problematic, I thought? I used the Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool to analyze the current top 10 for lingerie, and compared it to our client's stats. Page Authority in the top 10 is 37-68, our clients is 33. Domain Authority in the top 10 is 27-100 (wiki page), our clients is 43. MozRank for the top 10 is 6,6-8,0, our clients is 6,7. MozTrust for the top 10 is 7,0-7,1, our clients is 7,0. The basics all look fine! Now, the page could use some link building, the number of links is a little low compared to the top 10 entries. We're also in the process of redesigning the page, adding more products but also more content (text and images) to inspire visitors a little more. But being low on links doesn't seem a good explanation for such a relatively sudden change in ranking. As far as we can tell, looking back at commits by our developers, nothing changed around that time that could have this impact. Of course it's possible that we missed something, we're still looking. Also, it's strange that these sudden changes took place for swimwear and especially lingerie, but not for nightwear. I'd really appreciate any tips, hints etc. to find out what's going on here. Thanks in advance! Michel

I'm trying to wrap my head around various options when it comes to international SEO, specifically how to rank well in countries that share a language, and the risk of duplicate content in these cases. We have a chance to start from scratch because we're switching to a new e-commerce platform, and we were looking into using hreflang. Let's assume an example of a .com webshop that targets both Austria and Germany. One option is to include both language and region in the URL, and mark these as such using hreflang: webshop.com/de-de/german-language-content (with hreflang de-de)
webshop.com/de-at/german-language-content  (with hreflang de-at) Another option would be to only include the language in the URL, not the region, and let Google figure out the rest: webshop.com/de/german-language-content (with hreflang de) Which would be better? The risk of inserting a country, of course, is that you're introducing duplicate content, especially since for webshops there are usually only minor differences in content (pricing, currency, a word here and there). If hreflang is an effective means to make sure that visitors from each country get the correct URL from the search engines, I don't see any reason not to use this way. But if search engines get it wrong, users will end up in the wrong page and will have to switch country, which could result in conversion loss. Also, if you only use language in the URL, is it useful at all to use hreflang? Aren't engines perfectly able to recognize language already? I don't mention ccTLDs here because most of the time we're required to use a .com domain owned by our customer. But if we did, would that be much better? And would it still be useful to use hreflang then? webshop.de/german-language-content (with hreflang de-de)
webshop.at/german-language-content (with hreflang de-at) Michel Hendriks
Docdata Commerce

We have made the decision to start using a new ecommerce platform, which means we will have to migrate our existing webshops. Some of our new customers will be launched on the new platform straight away. Some limitations we used to have when it comes to URL structure have mostly been lifted, so I've been thinking what the perfect URL would be in terms of SEO. Since we mostly work for pan European customers, the multi regional and multi lingual aspect is a very important one, as it's important to rank well in all countries. I've always figured that even though it would be good to integrate country into the URL somehow to indicate to the engines that this content is meant for a certain country (either by using local TLDs or indicating using Webmaster Tools that a certain subdirectory or subdomain is targeting a country specifically), there are multiple countries with the same language (for instance, they speak French in France but also in Belgium), which could cause duplicate content issues: www.webshop.com/be/fr/french-product-name
www.webshop.com/fr/fr/french-product-name I guess it won't matter much whether you use fr.webshop.com, www.webshop.com/fr or www.webshop.fr, it's mostly the decision IF you want to include country somehow. What do you all think, is this important? Or is the multi lingual component enough for pages to rank well in several countries? For instance, if we were to use the language component only: www.webshop.com/fr/french-product-name Would this have the potential to rank well in both the French speaking part of Belgium, as well as France? Michel

We have a website that displays a number of products. The product has variations (sizes) and unfortunately every size has its own URL (for now anyway). Needless to say, this causes duplicate content issues. (And of course, we are looking to change the URL's for our site as soon as possible) However, even though these duplicate URL's exist, you should not be able to land on them by navigating through the site. In theory, the site should always display the link to the smallest size. It seems that there is a flaw in our system somewhere, as these links are now found in our campaign here on SEOmoz. My question: is there any way to find the crawl path that lead to the URL's that shouldn't have been found, so we can locate the problem?

One of the first things I remember reading about SEO and URLs, a long time ago, is that keywords are important, and hierarchy is important, for search engines and for users. Hierarchy in URLs would give the search engines an idea of the structure of the site, and users would be able to edit the URLs to continue navigating. I'm wondering about URLs, hierarchy and usability lately, since I've seen that ASOS uses a new URL structure on their site. At first glance, I thought it was brilliant, so I would like to get all of your opinions as well. For those of you that haven't seen the URLs: for categories, ASOS uses a structure as you would expect it, but for products they don't insert the category in the URL. Instead they insert the brand name as the first part of the URL, followed by the product title. Some examples: Category:
www.asos.com/women/dresses/... Product:
www.asos.com/french-connection/french-connection-tie-waist-pocket-stripe-dress/... I can see the importance of brand name for a site like ASOS, and like how they stressed this by inserting not the category but the brand for products. I don't know how much ASOS still relies on organic non-ASOS related keyword traffic, but still. Now, for hierarchy, I guess a good internal linking structure will tell the search engines about the hierarchy of a site as well, right? So perhaps hierarchy in the URL isn't that important? Perhaps something like this would be just as good as anything, given a good internal link structure? www.onlinestore.com/category/
www.onlinestore.com/subcategory/
www.onlinestore.com/brand/product-title/ Now, I understand that if you use this structure, you wouldn't be able to have men/shirts and women/shirts, but let's say that you don't have subcategories that use the same names. In this case, how important is hierarchy? And, what do you think about this URL structure for an ecommerce site for which brands are important?

This may be a very basic question, but with all this talk about overoptimization I just want to make sure we get this right. We run a webshop for a manufacturer of leather products. Billfolds, iPhone sleeves, briefcases etc. Their company name (also the domain name at which the webshop is active) does not include 'leather'. Obviously, leather is an important keyword for these products, but having a category page with 'leather X', 'leather Y', 'leather Z' not only looks weird, it might even look spammy. The same, though to a lesser extent, is true for the category names. Do we really want to have 'leather billfolds', 'leather ipad sleeves' etc. at the top of every category? Can anyone give some tips, pointers, best practices perhaps for when an important keyword is basically true for every category/product/page of your site? How do you include it without overoptimizing?

We have an international webshop with languages in the URLs. Our URLs are now set up as follows: http://thermalunderwear.eu/eng/category/product Now, we know that there's some kind of strange redirect problem causing problems with our indexation, this is a technical issue that should be fixed soon. But whether this is the cause of some other strange problems, I do not know. I'd be happy with any help/advice/tips. 1. The SEOmoz site crawler starts at http://thermalunderwear.eu. This currently does not yet redirect to http://thermalunderwear.eu/eng like we want it to, but all the links on the page do include the default language code. So all links on the page are http://thermalunderwear.eu/eng/category etc. However, apart from those URLs, the site crawler finds many URLs in the form http://thermalunderwear.eu/category/product etc., so not including the language variable. Where it gets these I do not know, and since these URLs dont exist and the webshop simply shows the homepage, these URLs all have 50+ duplicate titles/content. Why oh why? 2. If I do a Google search for indexed URL's with English as language, I get many results formatted like this: Coldpruf Enthusiast mens thermal shirt - Thermal wear for men ...
thermalunderwear.eu/eng/men/coldpruf-enthusiast-mens-thermal-shirt 170+ items – Fine-ribbed longsleeve thermal shirt men from Enthusiast ... {$SCRIPT_NAME} eng/men/coldpruf-enthusiast-mens-the {$ajax_url} http://thermalunderwear.eu/ajax What are those variables doing there? It looks like it's taking something from our Smarty debug console, which is hidden but still active in the source code, but also the ajax URL which is in a completely different location. What is Google trying to show here?