SEO for Online Auto Parts Store
-
I'm currently doing an audit for an online auto parts store and am having a hard time wrapping my head around their duplicate content issue. The current set up is this:
- The catalogue starts with the user selecting their year of vehicle
- They then choose their brand (so each of the year pages have listed every single brand of car, creating duplicate content)
- They then choose their model of car and then the engine
- And then this takes them to a page listing every type/category of product they sell (so each and every model type/engine size has the exact same content!) This is amounting to literally thousands of pages being seen as duplicates
It's a giant mess. Is using rel=canonical the best thing to do? I'm having a hard time seeing a logical way of structuring the site to avoid this issue.
Anyone have any ideas?
-
First, is this content dynamic? Depending on how the user progresses through these choices a search engine may not even see this information.
Second, as long as those aren't the pages you are trying to rank I can't see them actually having that big of an impact (if any) on your overall SEO. There is a difference between having pages that have the same content, and having pages that are duplicate content.
Rel canonical would be another way to save your skin, and making sure that the choices themselves are no-follow links (as long as there is some other method to get to the deeper pages).
Personally for the sake of SEO and user experience (which is far more important) I'd talk to the company about creating a dynamic selection wizard that could be a popup and once the user makes all their choices brings them to the right HTML page.
The HTML pages would be open, crawl-able, structured and sitemapped and the wizard would by a dynamic widget loaded in from a page that was robots disallowed. Helping both the human and spider experience - just my two cents!
Best of luck!
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
-
Need Some Quality Vs. Quantity SEO Advice
We have a gallery here with our main categories of patches. https://www.stadriemblems.com/gallery/ If you click on one, say Fire Patches, you'll be taken to a page of just fire patches. https://www.stadriemblems.com/fire-patches/ But here's the kicker: If you notice of the fire patch page, there are also sub-categories to that. So if you click on say, Fire Rescue, you get taken one level deeper. https://www.stadriemblems.com/fire-patches/fire-rescue-patches/ I'm redoing this entire site (a project over five years overdue), and I'm wondering if it's really worth it to keep these three-level deep sub pages. I originally created them with long tail SEO in mind, making us be the only ones who come up when people search for very specific patches. But it's a big undertaking to redo all of them, and are they really adding any value?
On-Page Optimization | | UnderRugSwept0 -
SEO for e-commerce websites
Hi, I'm a novice building a website (on wordpress with the plug-in Woocommerce) and would like some advice on how to optimise my online store for SEO. Does 'traditional' link building apply to e-commerce What else should I consider Should I write a blog/vlog/ Thanks, Lindsay
On-Page Optimization | | lindsayhopkins0 -
Harms of hidden categories on SEO
On our website we have some invisible/hidden categories on our site. Can anyone advise whether these are harmful in terms of SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | CostumeD0 -
Microsoft SEO Toolkit vs MoZ
Hi MoZ Community, Does anybody know how well is Microsoft SEO Toolkit. As far i have noticed this tool reports around 20 violations under three broad areas like : SEO, Content and Performance. On many violations I have found MoZ to be silent like : 1-unnecessary redirects 2-Invalid mark ups 3-Missing Tag 4-like vilations and others Important is that it tells solutions as well against each violation on how to fix that. Any body can give insights while comparing it with MoZ. Tanveer
On-Page Optimization | | Sequelmed0 -
SEO value of old press releases (as content)?
Howdy Moz Community, I'm working with a client on migrating content to a new site/CMS and am wondering whether anyone has thoughts on the value of old press releases. I'm familiar with the devaluation of press release links from early 2013, but I'm wondering more about their value as content. Does importing old press releases (3-5 years old) create contextual depth of content that has some value for the site as a whole (even though the news contained within is useless)? Or, do these old press releases just create clutter and waste time (in migration). The site has a wealth of additional content (articles and videos), so the press releases wouldn't be covering up for thin content. I'm just wondering whether there's any best practices or a general rule of thumb. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | MilesMedia0 -
Looking for a few hours of consult from an on-page/redirection SEO guru.
Hi! I could post our question here, but I think we will need an hour or so of questions and answers. Anyone consider themselves an on-page guru or redirection strategy guru? Here is the breakdown: 1. We sell digital media. 2. Most of the pages that return for us in the serps are indexed Search Results pages. From the research we have done, these are our highest trafficked results, but also our lowest converters. We have hundreds of thousands of indexed and dynamic Search Result pages we need to deal with. 3. We are concerned about Panda eventually giving us issues with these indexed Search Pages. 4. We would like to 301 re-direct these indexed Search Results pages to applicable product pages. 5. Looking for advice on a strategy to do so which would include the best way to locate the pages we need to 301 in the SERPS, being careful that the 301 will help and not harm us, etc. Note, we are just looking for a couple of hours of discussion and guidance. We don't need a massive SEO analysis or anything. Just looking for input and guidance on this one particular issue. If you just want to answer here for free, hey, we won't complain, but are happy to pay for quality advice. PM if interested. Thanks! Craig
On-Page Optimization | | TheCraig0 -
SEO for EMD
Hi, I bought ForSaleInAZ.com for my real estate website. Google Keyword Tool estimate 301k local searches for that term. I would like to capitalize on this by building this site with good content. My question to you, besides the search being the URL, what is the best practice to specifically promote the "For Sale In AZ" phrase? Should it be in the Page Title, Meta Description, Content H1 & H2 tags, Image tag? Or, is it being in the URL good enough...so all I have to do is build good content? I understand not to over do it but I could use your advice. Can you please give me some suggestions/ guidelines to follow specifically to my EMD? SEO Expertise Level: I am comfortable and have the decent understanding but, by no means, an expert! Thanks, Carl
On-Page Optimization | | AmSupMktg0 -
Wix.com Website Builder Html5 and SEO, what is your opinion
I'm planing to built a multilanguage website using a website builder. After reading websitetooltester.com reviews I came to the conclusion, wix.com should be the website builder I need. My first reason are the templates and there multilanguage options. But there is one thing, ready the review they mention: ''This is a bit technical; you can find the short version below. Wix is using the “single page pattern” meaning that the complete website code is essentially on one page. This works well for website visitors but not necessarily for Google as contents will be shown dynamically using Javascript and DOM manipulation. To solve this, Google supports something called ‘escaped fragments’ (or ugly URLs). With regards to Wix, it means that URLs will end like this: “#!wixseo|cqh1”. Google replaces the “#!” by “?escaped_fragment=” and receives only a minimal text-only page without Javascript. And this works well for Google. Try it here:
On-Page Optimization | | BigBlaze205
http://www.html5-websitebuilder.com/?escaped_fragment=cqh1 The official page ID is “cqh1” and not “wixseo”. But as the URL contains both IDs, the visitor can even see a description that’s readable by humans (and that’s important for SEO). You may have seen URLs containing “#!” already if you are a Twitter user.'' Should I worry about Google indexing all the pages? Is this website builder SEO frendly? Thank you for your help and time, BigBlaze0