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Hi Guys,

I am hoping that you may be able to help with an internal debate on whether our currently category structuring could be damaging from an SEO point of view.

Our site sells t shirts primarily and as such we have a large product base of around 7000+ products. Our category structure currently works like so:

Mens/T-Shirts/Movie&TV/TV/

Which I think is fairly typical, though this where it gets interesting, within this end category of "/TV/" there are around 120 categories that are used from a filtration point of view to contain items for each specific show etc, IE Mens/T-Shirts/Movie&TV/TV/Breaking_Bad, Mens/T-Shirts/Movie&TV/TV/Game_of_Thrones. The vast majority of these categories have between 1 and 3 products within them and the rest higher.

Multiply this by the large amount of categories that we have on site and these end level "Band Title" categories amount to around 13,000+ categories in the directory.

If at this point we put the filtration element aside, what is the communities opinion of the benefits or drawbacks of having the category structure like this?

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

Thanks guys, just realised I said disavow, I mean to say updates robots.txt to disallow:  feedurl

Would that be worth implementing prior to rel=canonical on these pages, with our current dev timeline, this would not be done until the new year at this point.

Hi All,

Thanks in advance for any help that you can offer in regards to this. I have been conducted a bit of analysis of our server access file to see what googlebot is doing, where it is going etc. Now firstly, I am not SEO but have an interest. What I am seeing a lot of is that we have URL's that have an extension that sets the currency that is displayed on the products so that we can conduct Adwords campaigns in other countries, these show as follows: feedurl=AUD, feedurl=USD, feedurl=EUR etc.

What I can see is that google bot is hitting a URL such as /some_product, then /someproduct?feedurl=USD and then /someproduct?feedurl=EUR and then /someproduct?feedurl=AUD all after each other. Now this is the same product page and just has the price shown slightly different on each. Would this count as a duplicate content issue? Should I disavow feedurl?

Any assistance that you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Tim

We were under penalty for certain keywords as a result of a poor link building strategy in the past. This led us to have to use the disavow tool in a fairly broad manner. The results were pretty inconclusive though, while we certainly saw some of the keywords recover as a result, this was not in the manner that they were at before penalty and we saw the most dramatic effect on the long tail keywords.

There were instances of shorter keywords improving, though this was fairly minimal. What I would say though is that it is still better to disavow those spammy backlinks now than suffer in the long term as a result and even if there is no improvement I would not necessarily expect to see a drop as a result.

Tim

Great answer Andy, had already posted my previous response to Don.

We do have design resources in house so this is not an issue, I guess that in the past we have been pretty tied up in grasping at straws to find a post that can relate in some way to a new product. I get the whole concept of content being king but I do also get that there is the notion that in the past we have maybe tried too had to draw parallels between an article and a product in the thin hope of that article bringing in convertable traffic.

Again, a really helpful post that I will certainly look to expand upon further and will be more than happy to feedback any results.

As for the tracking, thats exactly how we do track the conversions from the blog so yes please, would really appreciate any guidance in being able to track customers from the blog better.

Thanks,

Tim

Thanks Don,

They are all great points and we do already carry service reviews for the site, but not on products so this certainly something that I am keen to look in to further. We currently just have product page ratings.

One thing though that I am still unsure of and could do with some assistance with is an idea of what kind of strategy should be employed in terms of content. Is it a good idea to put a lot of resources in to the blog content, whilst this does get a lot of traffic, if does not convert particularly well in relation to products. But is it good for the domain as a whole? What kind of effect would be achievable on the domain as a whole by allocating resources in this manner?

Thanks again,

Tim

Do you have any caching on the site that may be preventing the update to be seen live? If you open the page in a browser, is the page title your new and updated title?

If the answer is no, then I would look at any caching that may be holding your previous page elements rather than your new one.

I have a retail website that in the past has been hit by a manual action for crappy backlinks (these were all done by a previous agency and up until the penalty providing very good results). We have since removed all of the rubbish backlinks and have come out of manual penalty and are looking in to our long term strategy in terms of content and link building.

We have a blog within our site that does well with traffic and with an OK conversion to the products that feature within the posts, we are also putting together a strategy in terms of long term content plans and while this is all very good for the blog, the ecommerce part of the domain continues to suffer.

I know that part of this is because we did remove all of these links that were giving it juice, but where do you start with SEO when what you are dealing with is essentially thin content?

With around 7000 products, every page has unique descriptions and titles that have been updated to remove keyword stuffing and over optimisation that has occured in the past. We don't want to go down the route of getting an agency that is going to put us back in Googles bad books, but how do you go about getting a retail page juice without firing backlinks at it?

Not looking for the holy grail here but just looking for some advice, I want a clear idea of a direction to go in before recruiting an agency to do this.

We were under penalty for certain keywords as a result of a poor link building strategy in the past. This led us to have to use the disavow tool in a fairly broad manner. The results were pretty inconclusive though, while we certainly saw some of the keywords recover as a result, this was not in the manner that they were at before penalty and we saw the most dramatic effect on the long tail keywords.

There were instances of shorter keywords improving, though this was fairly minimal. What I would say though is that it is still better to disavow those spammy backlinks now than suffer in the long term as a result and even if there is no improvement I would not necessarily expect to see a drop as a result.

Tim