Category pages are useful to help users browse deeper into your site; however, I doubt you are seeing significant SEO impact from not having your category folder in your product URLs. In general, it's usually better to keep a page at the same URL rather than to move it, and having a slightly more "SEO-friendly" URL wouldn't provide enough SEO benefit to be worth the risk and hassle that moving all of your product pages would take. I think it's fine to leave it how it is.
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Best posts made by RuthBurrReedy
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RE: URL Structure On Site - Currently it's domain/product-name NOT domain/category/product name is this bad?
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RE: Good robots txt for magento
Peter is correct - your search, admin and user pages are common pages to block for Magento. What you block is up to you, though. Don't forget that a page that is blocked by robots.txt can still be found by search engines, so if it's a page that will contain private information you should protect it with a password.
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RE: How does Infinite Scrolling work with unique URLS as users scroll down? And is this SEO friendly?
Hi Christian,
What you're seeing is exactly what Google recommends for infinite scroll in the resource you link to. It breaks the page up into component resources (separate URLs) each of which could be accessed on its own. Their examples use dynamic parameters to break up into e.g. page=2, but if your infinite- or long-scrolling page isn't paginated content, there's no reason why each component couldn't have its own URL that is accessed as you scroll down.
I actually really like this method as a compromise between the "one long page with all the information on it" approach to web design and the "landing pages for people looking for specific bits of information" approach to SEO. For example, I often have SAAS clients who want all the information about what their product does to be one one long page. This is great for people who want to research the whole product at once, but makes it hard for me to optimize for keywords pertaining to individual features of the product. The solution is to have separate landing pages that talk about specific features, all linked together in one "product" page that scrolls using the methodology outlined in the Google resource you linked to. Plus, it means that people who are just looking for that one feature arrive on a page that's about that feature, instead of having to scroll to find what they're looking for.
With the infinite scroll situation, Google is only usually going to crawl and index what is available to the user before more of the page loads - so if you want Google to crawl and index all of the content on your infinite-scroll page, this is the way to do it. It's also better for users who don't have JavaScript enabled. I hope that makes sense and let me know if you have more questions!
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RE: How can I personalize content based on a state/region? Is it possible?
I agree with Miriam. The only thing I would add here - consider making changes to your lead conversion form to reinforce the "we only work in California" aspect. This could be like a check box up front that says "Are you located in California?" If they select "No," the rest of the form disappears and they get a message that says "At this time, we're only able to serve the California area. Thank you for your interest!" or something. You could keep your lead form as-is and if people select a state other than California when entering their location information, send them to a different thank you page that delivers a similar message.
Basically, I would recommend changing your lead process so that a.) it's really clear to users that you don't operate outside of California, and b.) the information about whether or not a lead is from California is easy to see up-front in your lead management system. You'll probably still get some irrelevant leads (everyone does), but you'll be able to deal with them quicker.
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RE: Meta Tag Force Page Refresh - Good or Bad?
Hi Todd,
Using the Pragma no-cache tag means that no cached content from that page will be used when a user next accesses the page; the request will go back to the origin server instead. It's useful when you have a frequently-updated page that you don't want users to end up seeing older versions of. It's generally considered to be a bit of an outdated tag - you may want to explore using your HTTP headers to expire content instead - but won't hurt you with the search engines (or prevent the Cached version of your page from showing up in the SERPs). Hope that helps!
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RE: Does show/hide element with javascript impact SEO
Ennovation and Malcolm are right - search engines will see the entire text, as long as the JS is just being used for show/hide (users without JS enabled will see the same thing).
As long as there is an option to show the text (i.e. it's not completely hidden from users), and the text itself isn't keyword-stuffed or spammy, I can't see a reason why search engines would consider it spam.
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RE: Shopify Blog vs Wordpress
A WordPress developer should be able to help you get your blog looking more like the rest of your site, yes. I would definitely recommend having your blog at sininlinen.com/blog rather than at blog.sininlinen.com - if your blog is a subdomain, Google will have a harder time telling that it's part of your overall site and not its own, separate site.
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RE: Delete 301 redirected pages from server after redirect is in place?
50 redirects is a lot of redirects for one week! Sometimes when that much change has happened on a site it can longer than a few days for the site to be fully re-crawled/indexed and your rankings to normalize. Have you updated your sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools?
I always like to put a self-canonical tag in where it makes sense, just because there are a lot of URL parameters (session IDs, tracking code, etc) that can cause duplicate URLs and it's nice to have the stripped-down plain URL be the canonical version.
Can you clarify what you mean by "the old pages are still visible to Google's bot"? Do you mean they're still showing up in the index after the redirect is in place? If so it could just be that your site hasn't been re-crawled yet. Some other things to check: Have you updated your internal links that pointed to the old pages so that they point to the new page? Have you done a link building push to try to get some external link love to the new page? Basically I would say don't rely on the redirects alone to help the bot find the new page.
Kristinn's suggestion would be another way to go: don't redirect the other pages, instead post a link at the top saying "for updated info go over here" and then canonical the old pages to the new page. Over time though a 301 is going to be the best long-term solution. If the URL is redirecting you shouldn't need to keep the content up on the page.