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Hello 🙂 Does anybody know about any ecommerce sites that have done PIM-enrichment projects with great success, resulting in significant increase in organic traffic and rankings? Our agency is doing a presentation about leveraging better and more product information for long-tail SEO, and we'd like some success cases to point to. Thanks 🙂
Sigurd Bjurbeck, SEO-consultant

Hello This questions plays on what Joe Hall talked about during this years' MozCon: Rethinking Information Architecture for SEO and Content Marketing. My Case:
So.. we're working out guidelines and templates for a costumer (sporting goods store) on how to publish content (articles, videos, guides) on their category pages, product pages, and other pages. At this moment I have 2 choices:
1. Use a url-structure/information architecture where all the content is placed in one subfolder, for example domain.com/content. Although it's placed here, there's gonna be extensive internal linking from /content to the related category pages, so the content about bikes (even if it's placed under domain.com/bikes) will be just as visible on the pages related to bikes. 2. Place the content about bikes on a subdirectory under the bike category, **for example domain.com/bikes/content. ** The UX/interface for these two scenarios will be identical, but the directories/folder-hierarchy/url structure will be different. According to Joe Hall, the latter scenario will build up more topical authority and relevance towards the category/topic, and should be the overall most ideal setup. Any thoughts on which of the two solutions is the most ideal? PS: There is one critical caveat her: my costumer uses many url-slugs subdirectories for their categories, for example domain.com/activity/summer/bikes/, which means the content in the first scenario will be 4 steps away from the home page. Is this gonna be a problem? Looking forward to your thoughts 🙂 Sigurd, INEVO

Hello, Moz Community My client's site hasn't been indexed by Google, although it was launched a couple of months ago. I've ran down the check points in this article https://moz.com/ugc/8-reasons-why-your-site-might-not-get-indexed without finding a reason why. Any sharp SEO-eyes out there who can spot this quickly? The url is: http://www.oldermann.no/ Thank you
INEVO, digital agency

Hi, Moz community For some of the category-pages, Google is showing some of the brands in the SERP, like this: http://www.screencast.com/t/62wldbwc
This is the page-url: https://www.gsport.no/sport/loep/lopeklaer/loepebukse For other category-pages that seemingly is built with similar code and settings, Google doesn't show brands in the snippet: http://www.screencast.com/t/zU9cg7odf
The page-url: https://www.gsport.no/sport/loep/lopeklaer/loepejakke This all begs the questions:
If the two pages contain the same code/html in terms of schema.org / rich snippets, why is Google choosing to display the brands in the SERP for only one of them? And is there something I can do in order to make them display the brands for all my pages? Thank you
Sigurd Bjurbeck, INEVO (digital agency)

Hi, I am banging my head against the wall regarding the website of a costumer: In "duplicate title tags" in GSC I can see that Google is indexing a whole bunch parametres of many of the url's on the page. When I check the rel=canonical tag, everything seems correct. My costumer is the biggest sports retailer in Norway. Their webshop has approximately 20 000 products. Yet they have more than 400 000 pages indexed by Google. So why is Google indexing pages like this? What is missing in this canonical?https://www.gsport.no/herre/klaer/bukse-shorts?type-bukser-334=regnbukser&order=price&dir=descWhy isn't Google just cutting off the ?type-bukser-334=regnbukser&order=price&dir=desc part of the url?Can it be the canonical-tag itself, or could the problem be somewhere in the CMS? Looking forward to your answers Sigurd

Hi, folks A client of mine now has roughly 30 000 503-errors (found in the crawl error section of GSC). This is mostly pages with limited offers and deals. The 503 error seems to occur when the offers expire, and when the page is of no use anymore. These pages are not important for organic search, but gets traffic from direct and newsletters, mostly. My question:
Does having a high number of 503 pages reported in GSC constitute a problem in terms of organic ranking for the domain and the category and product pages (the pages that I want to rank for organically)? If it does, what is the best course of action to mitigate the problem? Looking excitingly forward to your answers to this 🙂 Sigurd

Hi, everybody In the Moz ranking tool for one of our client's (the client sells sport equipment) account, there is a trend where more and more of their landing pages are product pages instead of category pages. The optimal landing page for the term "sleeping bag" is of course the sleeping bag category page, but Google is sending them to a product page for a specific sleeping bag.. What could be the critical factors that makes the product page more relevant than the category page as the landing page?

Hi, I'm trying to find a sitemap generator/plugin that I can point my client to. My client is using Magento, and is one of the largest sports store i Norway (around 20 000 products). I've heard there's one that can set the <priority>according to page views, sold units, and other relevant parameters, and that also takes care of the other elements in the sitemap.xml.</priority> Any good recommendations out there? 🙂

My client and I have a problem: An ecommerce store with around 20 000 products has nearly 1 000 000 pages indexed (according to Search Console). I frequently get notified by messages saying “High number of URLs found” in search console. It lists a lot of sample urls with filter and parameters that are indexed by google, for example: https://www.gsport.no/barn-junior/tilbehor/hansker-votter/junior?stoerrelse-324=10-11-aar+10-aar+6-aar+12-aar+4-5-aar+8-9-aar&egenskaper-368=vindtett+vanntett&type-365=hansker&bruksomraade-367=fritid+alpint&dir=asc&order=name If you check the source code, there’s a canonical tag telling the crawler to ignore (..or technically commanding it to regard this exact page as another version of the page without all the parameters) everything after the “?” Does this url showing up in the Search Console message mean that this canonical isn’t working properly? If so: what’s wrong with it? Regards,
Sigurd

The reason for this mights be obvious to the right observer, but somehow I'm not able to spot the reason why. The situation:
I'm doing an SEO-audit for a client. When I'm checking if the rel=canonical tag is in place correctly, it seems like it: view-source:http://quickplay.no/fotball-mal.html?limit=15) (line nr 15) Anyone seing something wrong with this canonical? When I perform a site:http://quickplay.no/ search, I find that there's many url's indexed that ought to have been picked up by the canonical-tag: (see picture) ..this for example view-source:http://quickplay.no/fotball-mal.html?limit=15 I really can't see why this page is getting indexed, when the canonical-tag is in place. Anybody who can? Sincerely 🙂 GMdWg0K

Hi ! In Moz' Whiteboard friday video Headline Writing and Title Tag SEO in a Clickbait World, Rand is talking about (among other things) best practices related to linking between search, clickbait and conversion pages. For a client of ours, a cosmetics and make-up retailer, we are planning to build content pages around related keywords, for example video, pictures and text about make-up and fashion in order to best target and capture search traffic related to make-up that is prevalent earlier in the costumer journey. Among other things, we plan to use these content pages to link directly to some of the products. For example a content piece about how to achieve full lashes will to link to particular mascaras and/or the mascara category) Things is, in the Whiteboard video Rand Says:
_"..So your click-bait piece, a lot of times with click-bait pieces they're going to perform worse if you go over and try and link directly to your conversion page, because it looks like you're trying to sell people something. That's not what plays on Facebook, on Twitter, on social media in general. What plays is, "Hey, this is just entertainment, and I can just visit this piece and it's fun and funny and interesting." _ Does this mean linking directly to products pages (or category pages) from content pages is bad? Will Google think that, since we are also trying to sell something with the same piece of content, we do not deserve to rank that well on the content, and won't be considered that relevant for a search query where people are looking for make-up tips and make-up guides? Also.. is there any difference between linking from content to categories vs. products? ..I mean, a category page is not a conversion page the same way a products page is. Looking forward to your answers 🙂  

One of our clients (a children's clothing company) has split their categories (outwear, tops, shoes) between boys and girls - There's one category page for girls outwear, and one category for boys outwear. I am suspecting that this redundant categorisation is diluting link juice and rankings for the related search queries. Important points: The clothes themselves are rather gender-neutral, girl's sweaters don't differ that much from the boy's sweaters. Our keyword research indicates that norwegians' search queries are also pretty gender neutral - people are generally searching after "children's dresses", "shoes for kids", "snowsuits", etc. So these gender specific categories are not really reflective of people's search behavior. I acknowledge that implementing a filter for "boys" and "girls" would be the best way to solve this redundant categorization, but that would simply be to expensive for our client. I'm thinking that some sort of canonicalisation would be the best approach to solve this issue. Are there any other suggestions or comments to this?

Hi, I've seen several questions where people give advice on how to increase  the crawl budget. What I haven't seen anyone comment is what the value of this really is if you have many pages that doesn't get updated very often. Take for example the typical agency page - 50 pages, most of them rarely gets updates. In a monthly basis normally 10% of the website gets updated. Is there really any value then of having 100% of the website crawled on a daily basis?

We have a case with a client where they previously had content on top of their most important ecommerce categories. The content was well integrated and should in my opinion enhance the category experience, but after doing some A/B testing they proved to only decrease the conversion rates when sending traffic directly to those categories. Around that topic I have two questions: Is it a bad thing to put the content BELOW the categories? I need examples of categories where content and products are very well integrated and enhances the category experience - any tips?

A client of our have not been able to rank very well the last few years. They are a big brand in our country, have more than 100+ offline stores and have plenty of inbound links. Our main issue has been that they have to many indexed pages. Before we started we they had around 750.000 pages in the Google index. After a bit of work we got it down to 400-450.000. During our latest push we used the robots meta tag with "noindex, nofollow" on all pages we wanted to get out of the index, along with canonical to correct URL - nothing was done to robots.txt to block the crawlers from entering the pages we wanted out. Our aim is to get it down to roughly 5000+ pages. They just passed 5000 products + 100 categories. I added this about 10 days ago, but nothing has happened yet. Is there anything I can to do speed up the process of getting all the pages out of index? The page is vita.no if you want to have a look!

Hi, We've just increased a lot of branded PPC clicks for one of our clients. I've worked out that roughly 5000 clicks per month has been moved from organic search to PPC (all brand related search queries). These clicks are very cheap, but the client has expressed worries about what these clicks could do to our organic rankings. Lots of brand search in organic results proves to Google that this is a strong brand, right? So what happens when all the searches are still there, but the organic listings stop getting the clicks? Could this have a ring effect on other non-brand rankings?

Hi, If an ecommerce site has different prices for the different regions within the same country (based on IP location), will this impact Google somehow? Case: Furniture website in Norway. Shipping is expensive when you ship a sofa, so prices will differ depending on where in Norway you're located. Switching location is easy, but the default price you see will be based on your IP location.

Seomoz is currently reporting 404-errors, without saying where these errors are found. What good is this report when it does'nt say a word about where I can find the page linking to the 404? Screen: http://filer.crenia.no/NJPZ I really think it's time for Seomoz to prioritize upgrading the pro tools. Feels like they haven't been updated in ages..

Hi, Until now I've adviced a lot of web shops to avoid having long URL structures for their categories and products (aka. remove the useless slugs). Recently I discovered that Google started rolling out more and more results that looks like these screenshots: http://filer.crenia.no/McDn & http://filer.crenia.no/McYO (look at the URL in the SERP) I'm assuming the slugs are a vital part of creating these SERP results. Personally, I also think they look better and favor them compared to the old SERPs. Does anyone have any experience with these, what impact they have or any reason not to add slugs to URLs again?

I'm working on a few clients who are starting to get big header menus. Their site now easily exceeds the 100 links per page recommendation. Normally I would recommend them to cut down on the links, bit in this case these sites have menus that makes navigation easier. I honestly think these menus adds value for the users. The dilemma is that I think the menus provide value from an UX standpoint, but I'm not sure from the SEO standpoint. Any recommendations to this dilemma? Some examples: http://moodsofnorway.com/no/ http://www.gmax.no/ http://www.flust.no/

When searching for "kredittkort" on Norwegian Google I get a search results that looks like this. I want to replicate this, but I'm not sure what information they've provided and how they've done it. It's seems like their both listing products AND have sitelinks connected to a subsite. How is this possible? The sitelinks aren't even subpages of the ranked site. How have they managed this? Also, is the product previews they have?