Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Nigel:

Thanks - you pretty much confirmed my thoughts. At the moment, we don't have the ability to create hybrid pages - pages with category and product images. It's on the wish list. If it was up to me alone, we would only have PLPs at the bottom of the taxonomy. Our merchants group is pushing hard for PLPs.

BTW, Wayfair's SEO/UX is outstanding. Those folks are squared away. Any time I have an issue to resolve, it's wayfair.com and "view source".

First, let's define the terminology for the various types of ecommerce pages. The terminology differs from organization to organization:

1. Product Description Pages (PDPs): These pages have a single product, pricing, an "add to cart" button, reviews, and a product description.
2. Product Listing Pages (PLPs): These are product category/subcategory pages that have product image links and text links to Product Description Pages (PDPs).
3. Category Pages: These pages have subcategory image and text links to subcategory pages. No product images are displayed
4. Hybrid Category Pages: these pages combine sub-Category Images and text at the top of the page and product listings below. Our CMS currently does not allow us to create hybrids.

This conversation revolves primarily around mobile.

Our ecommerce team is having discussions around the appropriate use of PLPs vs Category pages. After doing a quick audit of the mobile sites of some top ecommerce players, there is definitely a trend to use Category Pages at the top of the category and sub-category hierarchy and use PLPs at the very bottom. The logic from a usability perspective is to allow visitors to navigate a site without ever using the hamburger navigation. ex:

Baby (Category Page) => Car Seats (Category Page) => Convertible Car Seats (PLP)

The sites I audited all had hamburger menus.

A visitor would navigate from a home page image for "Baby," an image on the "Baby" page to "Car Seats", and an image on the "Car Seats" page to the Convertible Car Seats page. At that point, they would be able to shop for "Convertible Car Seats" on a PLP.

This appears to be excellent UX and easy to use navigation. Theoretically, good for SEO as well. In short, category and subcategory pages are being used as navigation to allow visitors to easily navigate to the bottom of the hierarchy and shop on the most narrow page in the hierarchy. Much easier to use than a hamburger menu, but it does entail more clicks.

The discussion revolves around allowing users to shop for product at a higher level in the taxonomy. For example, what if a visitor wants to shop all Car Seats? In the above taxonomy, we are precluding users from shopping in this manner. There is no "Car Seats" PLP. Our CMS has the ability to create both a Category Page and a PLP for "Car Seats". We could theoretically place an image on the "Car Seats" category page for "View All Car Seats", and allow users to click to a "Car Seats" PLP.

None of the major ecommerce players I've audited are adding a PLP option higher up in the hierarchy. That doesn't mean that it's not good UX.

Problems:

1. From an SEO perspective, having a Category Page and a PLP for "Car Seats" would cause cannibalization - they would be competing for the same keywords.
2. I am skeptical that canonicals would work. The pages are not near duplicate content. One page has category images, the other has product images. We could place content blocks on the page to make them more similar.
3. We could noindex the PLP, but that's a waste of internal link juice.

Need advice:

1. Will canonicals work in this situation?
2. Should we trash this idea entirely? Does adding a PLP add value or confusion?
3. Is noindex a good idea?
4. Is there an option to target keyword variations with the PLP?
5. Is there another solution?

Will do. I'm not expecting much. Maybe a slight bump for products.

When targeting keywords with your blog, you should not be targeting keywords that you are targeting with your main site. That's called "keyword cannibalization", and it splits your ranking authority.

Generally, blog posts target keywords at the top of the conversion funnel (how to's, design ideas, etc) vs the bottom ("find an interior designer near me").

There are lots of tactics, but the blog is longer tail than your main site.

The answer probably revolves around your 301 redirects. I assume that you didn't keep the old URL structure.

1. Was your site https before the change?
2. Was it www? Did you have a trailing slash in the old URL?
3. Did you redirect all pages with backlinks? You really should 301 everything.
4. Did you change the links in the navigation?
5. Are you getting any alerts in search console?
6. Did the canonicals change?
7. Did the category filters change?

The simple answer is "find what changed". The complex answer is "find what changed". Do you have a copy of the old site? Run an audit on both. Sometimes you can also glean some insight from Google webmaster tools

Pick up a copy of "ecommerce seo" by Traian Neacsu. He doesn't have an audit checklist per se, but anything you could be doing wrong is in the book.

I can't answer your question, but a word of warning:

If you're moving a large site to https://, your rankings will drop for 2-8 weeks depending on the size of your site. We did this for an ecommerce site with 60,000 SKUs, and our rankings tanked for 6 weeks. It's "normal", but Google won't tell you how badly your site will get slammed. Be prepared.

A few very important suggestions:

1. Make sure that you set up http:// and https:// properties in Google Search Console.
2. Create a thorough and complete .xml sitemap(s) using the http:// prefix. Submit the sitemap to the https:// GSC property. This will help Google find and map the redirects more quickly. Keep an eye on search console for the count of http and https pages indexed.  Ideally, the http count should go to zero.
3. Make sure your redirects are set up correctly in your .htaccess file (Apache). There are several sites that will do 301 traces (google "301 tracer"). Keep the redirects at 2 hops or less. Make sure that redirects are 301. 302 is the .htaccess default, so make sure you call out "301".
4. There are several redirects that need to occur:

• http to https
• non-www to www or vice-versa
• URLs with a trailing slash to without a trailing slash or vice-versa.

When you make the cutover, test all combinations of the above redirects - there are 6 different combinations of the above bullets to test. (http with and without a trailing slash are 2, and with and without www for example)

Good answer. Thanks, Nigel. Exactly what I thought.

Do you think fixing this will have any significant positive rankings impact? I've never had to correct this before.

We are currently not using rel=prev/next for paginated categories. My predecessor instead canonicaled paginated pages back to the parent. This obviously needs to be fixed. The pages should self-canonical.

Is using the parameter handling function of Google Search Console enough, or do we need to have our dev team implement rel=prev/next?

About 2 years ago (well before I started with the company), we did an http=>https migration. It was not done correctly. The http=>https redirect was never inserted into the .htaccess file. In essence, we have 2 websites. According to Google search console, we have 19,000 HTTP URLs indexed and 9,500 HTTPS URLs indexed.

I've done a larger scale http=>https migration (60,000 SKUs), and our rankings dropped significantly for 6-8 weeks. We did this the right way, using sitemaps, and http and https GSC properties. Google came out recently and said that this type of rankings drop is normal for large sites.

I need to set the appropriate expectations for management. Questions:

1. How badly is the domain split affecting our rankings, if at all? Our rankings aren't bad, but I believe we are underperforming our backlink profile. Can we expect a net rankings gain when the smoke clears? There are a number of other technical SEO issues going on as well.
2. How badly will our rankings drop (temporarily) and for how long when we add the redirect to the .htaccess file?
3. Is there a way to mitigate the rankings impact? For example, only submitting partial sitemaps to our GSC http property?

Has anyone gone through this before?

This goes to the age-old SEO argument - how many links in the navigation.

1. We are a well-known brick and mortar brand
2. We have 20,000 SKUs and over 500 categories and sub-catetgories.
3. 95%+ of our backlinks go to the home page. We don't have a blog, but it's in the works.
4. Our site is not responsive. It serves up different versions based on device type, but is not an "M Dot".
5. Our rankings are pretty strong in spite of a large number of technical SEO issues (different discussion).

Currently, our  e-commerce desktop site is "Siloed" (I'm new to the company - I didn't do it). The home page links via the top nav to categories. The category pages link to subcategories via sidebar navigation, or via images on the category pages (instead of product images). It's pretty close to textbook silos, and it's very near how I would have designed it.

This silo architecture passes the most link juice to our categories which target our highest search volume (head) terms. The categories pass link juice (albeit significantly less) to our subcats which target secondary terms. In terms of search volume and commercial value, our tiers line up very neatly. On average, the targeted subcat terms get about 1/6 of the volume of our head terms.

The Silo concept has been around forever, and is evangelized by Bruce Clay and other respected SEOs. Every time I've siloed an ecommerce site, the rankings improve dramatically, so who am I to argue?

So, what's the problem? Read on...

Our mobile navigation, on the other hand, links to every category and subcategory via flyout navigation (I didn't do this, either). In theory, this distributes an equal amount of link juice to all categories and subcategories. It robs link juice from our categories and passes it to subcategories.

Right now, this isn't a problem. Rankings are based on the desktop site, and minor adjustments are made for mobile rankings.

When Mobile First rolls out, our mobile nav will be the default navigation for Google, and in theory, link juice distribution across the site will change radically, and potentially harm our rankings for our head terms.

I always study site architecture for a number of respected ecommerce sites. Target and Walmart, for example, link to every category and subcategory through their mobile and desktop navigation.  Wayfair takes a silo approach on mobile and desktop, linking in tiers.

I would argue that Walmart and Target have so much DA/TF/CF that they don't give a damn about targeted link juice distribution - it's all about UX. Wayfair's backlink profile is strong, but it's not Walmart or Target, so they need to be concerned about link juice distribution - hence the silo approach.

Have the Google spokespeople said anything about this? I see this as a potential landmine across the industry. Is this something I should be concerned about? Has anyone had any experience with de-siloing a website? Am I making a big deal out of a non-issue?

Please - no arguments about usability. UX is absolutely part of the equation. Usability is a ranking factor, but if our rankings and traffic take a nose dive, UX isn't going to matter.

This is a theoretical discussion discussion on link juice distribution, and I know that compromises need to be made between SEO and UX.

When targeting keywords with your blog, you should not be targeting keywords that you are targeting with your main site. That's called "keyword cannibalization", and it splits your ranking authority.

Generally, blog posts target keywords at the top of the conversion funnel (how to's, design ideas, etc) vs the bottom ("find an interior designer near me").

There are lots of tactics, but the blog is longer tail than your main site.

The answer probably revolves around your 301 redirects. I assume that you didn't keep the old URL structure.

1. Was your site https before the change?
2. Was it www? Did you have a trailing slash in the old URL?
3. Did you redirect all pages with backlinks? You really should 301 everything.
4. Did you change the links in the navigation?
5. Are you getting any alerts in search console?
6. Did the canonicals change?
7. Did the category filters change?

The simple answer is "find what changed". The complex answer is "find what changed". Do you have a copy of the old site? Run an audit on both. Sometimes you can also glean some insight from Google webmaster tools

Pick up a copy of "ecommerce seo" by Traian Neacsu. He doesn't have an audit checklist per se, but anything you could be doing wrong is in the book.