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Thanks for your answer and the link, that's actually very useful.
What I mainly struggle with is to understand what I can prune/not and based on what criterias. And the article you've linked is helping a fair bit on that aspect.

I'm thinking to start on multiple filter pages with a rule such as "block product listing pages from being indexed if at least 2 filters have been selected". And then see how it impacts the site and my crawl budget.

A product page is a page speaking about a selected product.
Example: a page about the smartphone Samguns Supernova 30

A product category is a page speaking about the category, or the type of product it falls into.
Example: smartphone or, if it is too broad, the Supernova line

A product listing is a page listing all the product refined with available criterias such as a product line.
Example: a page listing all the Samguns Supernova phones
Or a page listing all the Samguns Supernova phones with more than 128GB of HD.
Etc.

Does it make more sense?

Hi,

I've an ecommerce website with more than 50k urls and only 10% or so are getting crawled regularly by Google.
Product listing pages represent roughly 80% of these 50k pages.

Trying to improve this, I was thinking to remove altogether all (most?) of my product listing from search (via Robot.txt) to keep only the product pages themselves and the product categories.

My organic situation since Jan 2019:
Users: 2,300,000 (of which 9% are visiting product listing pages)
Page views:  8,000,000 (of which 5% are product listing pages).

Am I about to unleash armageddon (or more like harakiri) on my website by doing so or actually get Google to crawl much more relevant resources (product pages, product categories, blog content and so on)?

Thanks,
G

Hi Robert.

I will get the code checked and most probably set that redirect rule indeed.
Many thanks for the advice!

Hi,

I've seen a fair amount of topics speaking about the difference between domain names ending with or without trailing slashes, the impact on crawlers and how it behaves with canonical links.
However, it sticks to domain names only.
What about subfolders and pages then? How does it behaves with those?

Say I've a site structured like this:
https://www.domain.com
https://www.domain.com/page1

And for each of my pages, I've an automatic canonical link ending with a slash.
Eg. rel="canonical" href="https://www.domain.com/page1/" /> for the above page. SEM Rush flags this as a canonical error. But is it exactly?
Are all my canonical links wrong because of that slash?

And as subsidiary question, both domain.com/page1 and domain.com/page1/ are accessible. Is it this a mistake or it doesn't make any difference (I've read that those are considered different pages)?

Thanks!
G

That helps a lot indeed!
Thank you so much for your reply. I'll get on with this asap

It doesn't rank well at all no. But there is a myriad of other problems making it tricky to understand the impact of that one.

<1% is not keyword stuffing indeed but if the keyword targeted and the "noise" created by the prompts and call to actions all over the place is of a comparable volume, what does it tell Google?

Hi,

As everyone knows, lots of generic terms we use everyday (depends from one country to another obviously) are trademark terms and technically protected.
Some examples here  and there.

So my question is ... are we free to rank (or try to at least!) for some of these keywords?
Some of these keywords vastly outranked their original generic terms and there is little to no value trying to get traffic from the latter.

More specifically what about the keywords such as spin, spinning etc.?

Thanks!
G

Hi,

It might be a stupid question but I prefer to clear things out if it's not a problem:

Today I've seen a website where visitors are prompted no less than 5 times per page to "call [their] consultants".
This appears twice on the header, once on the side bar (mouse over pop up), once in the body of most of the pages and once in the footer.

So obviously, besides the body of the pages, it appears at least 4 times on every single pages as it's part of the website template.

In the past, I never really wondered re the menu, the footer etc as it's usually not hammering the same stuff repeatedly everywhere.

Anyway, I then had a look at their blog and, given the average length of their articles, the keyword density around these prompts is about 0.5% to 0.8% for each page. This is huge!

So basically my question is as follow: is Google's algorithm smart enough to understand what this is and make abstraction of this "content" to focus on the body of the pages (probably simply focusing on the tags)?

Or does it send wrong signals and confuse search engine more than anything else?

Reading stuff such as this, I wonder how does it work when this is not navigational or links elements.

Thanks,
G

Note: I’m purposely not speaking about the UX which is obviously impacted by such a hammering process.

Apologies for the delay coming back to you - Christmas didn't help.

And thanks for your answer; I will give this specific use of canonical a shot starting with small subsets of the site and monitor the impact on my ranking first.

Another interrogation on top of its impact on the site is to know whether it's worth the effort.
But I guess I'll only know it by trying directly.

Hello,

Several tools I'm using are returning errors due to "broken canonical links". However, I'm not too sure why is that.

Eg.
Page URL: domain.com/page.html?xxxx
Canonical link URL: domain.com/page.html
Returns an error.

Any idea why? Am I doing it wrong?

Thanks,
G

A product page is a page speaking about a selected product.
Example: a page about the smartphone Samguns Supernova 30

A product category is a page speaking about the category, or the type of product it falls into.
Example: smartphone or, if it is too broad, the Supernova line

A product listing is a page listing all the product refined with available criterias such as a product line.
Example: a page listing all the Samguns Supernova phones
Or a page listing all the Samguns Supernova phones with more than 128GB of HD.
Etc.

Does it make more sense?