Refactoring 20,000+ URLs and the SEO impact
-
I run a site that is largely powered by user reviews. We have almost 20,000 reviews, and each review has its own unique URL (/items/item-reviewed/reviews/1), as each one is quite lengthy and detailed (much longer than the normal Yelp review). Of course, the item being reviewed has its own URL (/items/item-reviewed), and we would very much prefer users are driven to that page rather than a review page in search results.
I've been looking into ways to improve our SEO, and I'm wondering if the current structure is hurting our SEO to the item page, and if so, what is the best way to 'solve' the issue without causing future SEO issues. Basically, are the 20,000 (and growing) review pages reducing the SEO impact of the actual item pages? I'd like to get the content in the reviews indexed, but not at the expense of negative SEO impact on the items being reviewed.
I have several follow-up questions if the answer to my question is indeed 'Yes, it is negatively impacting the SEO of your item page', so I'll await a response. Thanks!
-
The issue is largely theoretical. The product pages seem to usually outrank the review pages, but I'm just wondering that with so many links on the item pages directing to even more content, are both competing with each other in SEO results and could the item pages' SEO be improved (even if it isn't that bad at the moment) by simply having one page for search engines to focus on?
As for adding the product to each of the reviews, we do indeed do this in a limited manner. I provide breadcrumbs to show the user where they are from a site structure layout as well as a few details on the item itself (as well as our own version of 'add to cart'), but that's it.
Alongside the potential SEO impact, I gotta think that providing some way to view the review on-page (lightbox modal) would stil benefit from a user experience. Taking them away from the item page to a review page and hoping they hit the back button is probably something we should address. Now, as you said, how I handle that is less of an SEO issue, but the potential elimination of all those review URLs is, so I'm wondering also how to handle the 404s and 301s if I go this route. Like you said, interesting issue
Again, thanks for all the help!
-
I didn't realize the reviews were that long. That does kind of present a problem and yes you don't want to hide them in a non-display element. I have used css z-index and slide the review into the viewport instead of using javascript to switch the display attribute. But I have only done this on a few small sites. Nothing like yours. The reviews were of limited length so that worked for me. Probably won't work in your case.
Hum, interesting problem. You said you already have a preview and read more link on the product page but the review page out ranks the product page? Or is this just theoretical?
Sounds like you need to do some A / B testing to find out why and then promote the preforming content to the main page.
Stupid question but, if your review page is already highly ranked why not add the product to each of those? I have to assume there is an add to cart function on each page.
This seem like less of an SEO question then one about conversion rates. Which is OK. That's the whole point.
-
Thanks for the response. I was fairly sure that was the answer but wanted to be sure before I littered the post with conditional follow-ups. To be clear, the reviews are really, really long, and easily make up their own page. There are usually about 20-40 questions (with answers ranging from text to a star rating) per review, so following Amazon is easier said then done, but I want to make sure we're taking the best possible route. The item page also gives review previews for each review, with a "Read more" link for each review that takes them to the review page.
That said, here are my followups:
-
In order to get the entire review indexed, as you said, I could hide the review on the page. But isn't that an SEO no-no, as Google could interpret such a large amount of hidden divs and content incorrectly? To get past that before, I've usually shown the review on initial page load and hide what I want with Javascript afterwards. Would that be a better solution?
-
So say I do indeed get rid of the reviews as their own page and instead open up the review in a lightbox modal when "Read more" is clicked (my current plan). Now, I have 20,000 indexed URLs I need to do something with to avoid 20,000 404s. The way I see it, I can do one of the 2 in order to maintain a URL that gets the user to the review they want on the item page:
- Setup the review modals to match a url param (/items/item-reviewed?reviews=1)
- Setup the review modals to match a url anchor (/items/item-reviewed#reviews=1)
I'll of course want to 301 redirect the previous review URLs. If I chose option #1, wouldn't I still have the same issue, as Google would still index the URL with a query parameter separate from the item URL, right? However, if I went option #2, could I even 301 to the new anchor URL? I know the anchor is client-side only, but after some research, it sounds like everything but IE would support a redirect to a URL with an anchor. In this case, does Google just treat the 301 as a redirection to the item page, practically ignoring the anchor? Are there any negative SEO impacts option #2 presents (apart from IE stripping the anchor on the redirection)? Would (assume an item has 30 reviews) 30 permanent redirects to a single URL be perfectly fine via SEO standards?
Thanks so much for your time!
-
-
I think the answer to this one is pretty easy. Just look at every other e-com site with reviews. They are all on the same page as the product. For usability sake the review are usually hidden in some way on the same page.
Tab, accordian, read more links etc.. When it comes to this type of question always follow the SEO masters at amazon.
I also suggest you mark up the reviews in a micro format. Not for SEO but for click thru rates.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Same URL-Structure & the same number of URLs indexed on two different websites - can it lead to a Google penalty?
Hey guys. I've got a question about the url structure on two different websites with a similar topic (bith are job search websites). Although we are going to publish different content (texts) on these two websites and they will differ visually, the url structure (except for the domain name) remains exactly the same, as does the number of indexed landingpages on both pages. For example, www.yyy.com/jobs/mobile-developer & www.zzz.com/jobs/mobile-developer. In your opinion, can this lead to a Google penalty? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vde130 -
URL Parameters
Hi Moz Community, I'm working on a website that has URL parameters. After crawling the site, I've implemented canonical tags to all these URLs to prevent them from getting indexed by Google. However, today I've found out that Google has indexed plenty of URL parameters.. 1-Some of these URLs has canonical tags yet they are still indexed and live. 2- Some can't be discovered through site crawling and they are result in 5xx server error. Is there anything else that I can do (other than adding canonical tags) + how can I discover URL parameters indexed but not visible through site crawling? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bbop330 -
Redirect to url with parameter
I have a wiki (wiki 1) where many of the pages are well index in google. Because of a product change I had to create a new wiki (wiki 2) for the new version of my product. Now that most of my customers are using the new version of my product I like to redirect the user from wiki 1 to wiki 2. An example of a redirect could be from wiki1.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen to wiki2.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen. Because of a technical issue the url I redirect to, needs to have a parameter like "?" so the example will be wiki2.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen? Will the search engines see it as I have two pages with same content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Debitoor
wiki2.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen
and
wiki2.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen? And will the SEO juice from wiki1.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen be transfered to wiki2.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen?0 -
Complex URL Migration
Hi There, I have three separate questions which are all related. Some brief back ground. My client has an adventure tourism company that takes predominantly North American customers on adventure tours to three separate destinations: New Zealand, South America and the Himalayas. They previously had these sites on their own URL's. These URL's had the destination in the URL (eg: sitenewzealand.com). 2 of the three URL's had good age and lots of incoming links. This time last year a new web company was bought in and convinced them to pull all three sites onto a single domain and to put the sites under sub folders (eg: site.com/new-zealand). The built a brand new site for them on a Joomla platform. Unfortunately the new sites have not performed and halved the previous call to action rates. Organic traffic was not adversely affected with this change, however it hasn't grown either. I have been overhauling these new sites with a project team and we have managed to keep the new design but make usability/marketing changes that have the conversion rate nearly back to where it originally was and we have managed to keep the new design (and the CMS) in place. We have recently made programmatic changes to the joomla system to push the separate destination sites back onto their original URL's. My first question is around whether technically this was a good idea. Question 1 Does our logic below add up or is it flawed logic? The reasons we decided to migrate the sites back onto their old URL's were: We have assumed that with the majority of searches containing the actual destination (eg: "New Zealand") that all other things being equal it is likely to attract a higher click through rate on the domain www.sitenewzealand.com than for www.site.com/new-zealand. Having the "newzealand" in the actual URL would provide a rankings boost for target keyword phrases containing "new zealand" in them. We also wanted to create the consumer perception that we are specialists in each of the destinations which we service rather than having a single site which positions us as a "multi-destination" global travel company. Two of the old sites had solid incoming links and there has been very little new links acquired for the domain used for the past 12 months. It was also assumed that with the sites on their own domains that the theme for each site would be completely destination specific rather than having the single site with multiple destinations on it diluting this destination theme relevance. It is assumed that this would also help us to rank better for the destination specific search phrases (which account for 95% of all target keyword phrases). The downsides of this approach were that we were splitting out content onto three sites instead of one with a presumed associated drop in authority overall. The other major one was the actual disruption that a relatively complex domain migration could cause. Opinions on the logic we adopted for deciding to split these domains out would be highly appreciated. Question 2 We migrated the folder based destination specific sites back onto their old domains at the start of March. We were careful to thoroughly prepare the htaccess file to ensure we covered off all the new redirects needed and to directly redirect the old redirects to the new pages. The structure of each site and the content remained the same across the destination specific folders (eg: site.com/new-zealand/hiking became sitenewzealand.com/hiking). To achieve this splitting out of sites and the ability to keep the single instance of Joomla we wrote custom code to dynamically rewrite the URL's. This worked as designed. Unfortunately however, Joomla had a component which was dynamically creating the google site maps and as this had not had any code changes it got all confused and started feeding up a heap of URL's which never previously existed. This resulted in each site having 1000 - 2000 404's. It took us three weeks to work this out and to put a fix into place. This has now been done and we are down to zero 404's for each site in GWT and we have proper google site maps submitted (all done 3 days ago). In the meantime our organic rankings and traffic began to decline after around 5 days (after the migration) and after 10 days had dropped down to around 300 daily visitors from around 700 daily visitors. It has remained at that level for the past 2 weeks with no sign of any recovery. Now that we have fixed the 404's and have accurate site maps into google, how long do you think it will take to start to see an upwards trend again and how long it is likely to take to get to similar levels of organic traffic compared to pre-migration levels? (if at all). Question 3 The owner of the company is understandably nervous about the overall situation. He is wishing right now that we had never made the migration. If we decided to roll back to what we previously had are we likely to cause further recovery delays and would it come back to what we previously had in a reasonably quick time frame? A huge thanks to everyone for reading what is quite a technical and lengthy post and a big thank you in advance for any answers. Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activenz
Conrad0 -
Ecommerce SEO URL Structure Questions
| I am in the process of developing a new Magento ecommerce store. Take for instance this website is in the apparel industry and i have the following main categories. Clothing Shoes Accessories Beauty Sub categories for clothing would be: Dresses Pants jeans Tops Products would be: Kelly Maxi dresses What is the best SEO Structure for this? Main categories obviously: www.example.com/clothing Sub Categories:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WayneRooney
www.example.com/clothing/dresses Or www.example.com/dresses (Zappos seem to pursue the second type) Products:
www.example.com/clothing/dresses/kelly-maxi-dresses/ Or www.example.com/kelly-maxi-dresses ? Which one would be the best way to structure your site? Also what about filters that available in category pages? Say if i were to filter by color. what would be the best URL? I am sure canonical tag is needed here. New to Ecommerce SEO so i need some guidance! |0 -
Is there any SEO advantage to sharing links on twitter using google's url shortener goo.gl/
Hi is there any advantage to using <cite class="vurls">goo.gl/</cite> to shorten a URL for Twitter instead of other ones? I had a thought that <cite class="vurls">goo.gl/</cite> might allow google to track click throughs and hence judge popularity.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | S_Curtis0 -
SEO for eCommerce?
I'm working on a game plan for the on-page optimization for a growing e-commerce site (https://www.boutine.com) and I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with similar projects. Specifically, how to get the most SEO value out of product and category pages. Thanks in advance! -Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boutine0 -
Google Maps results doesn't show my site url but rather the maps url, why is this?
For several of my clients landing pages that show up in the Maps results the website url has been overwritten by the maps url (maps.google.com). Even though on my places page I have the correct website set up. Does anyone have any idea why they would be doing this and how I can correct it? Thanks kinldy in advance, Aaron. maps-url.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | afranklin0