Product Tag Pages - Shopify
-
My website is Sportiqe.com. We sell t-shirts and use Shopify.
We're finding that Google is assigning a higher than normal (normal being "1") page authority ranking on our product tag pages (ie - Products Tagged "knicks").
Would it make sense to do 301 redirects for these product tag pages to the Product pages we want to rank for? (ie - would we do a 301 redirect for a page called "Products Tagged 'Knicks'" to our "New York Knicks Shirts" page?)
OR
Would it make sense to change these Product Tag Page titles to another key term to have multiple search results (assuming that ordering the products in a different way would eliminate any Duplicate Page Content issues?) For example, renaming the page title from "Products Tagged Knicks" to "TAG NAME | Sportiqe Apparel"
Appreciate any insight from the Moz community, Shopify store managers and fellow t-shirt enthusiasts.
-
Everett, thank you so much for your advice and assistance.
Please email [email protected] with your t-shirt size, mailing address and any particular shirt you like at Sportiqe.com and I'll make sure that we send something your way as a thank you.
Enjoy the weekend.
-
1. If the tag page has one or more external links then you should redirect it to send that pagerank to the collections page. Otherwise it's probably not worth the effort.
2. You shouldn't add a "no follow" tag to the product tag pages, but you should add a "no index" tag. Preferably it would be "noindex, follow".
3. Yes you should include the collections links on your product pages. If you have too many links on a page there are other less important links to get rid of.
Also, since you're going to be sending pagerank into category pages (i.e. collection pages) you should look into putting a short, unique, helpful category description on those pages. You'd be amazed at how much this helps category pages rank for short and mid-tail keywords if you get just a couple of decent external links to them too.
-
Thanks for the thoughtful advice Everett! I went into Shopify as you suggested and discovered that not only could you hide all tags from product pages (without deleting them, which is important because this is how our products are categorized on the backend), but you could display the collections a particular t-shirt belongs to instead of the product tags.
See here for an example of a t-shirt with collections displayed instead of product tags.
If I'm understanding the power of internal links, this should help increase the pagerank for our t-shirt collections (which is where we ultimately want to drive people).
A couple of follow up questions...
-
Should we now redirect tag pages to relevant collections so the PR transfers? (ie - redirect the "knicks" tag to the New York Knicks T-Shirts page?)
-
Or, should we add no follow tags to all of our product tag pages?
-
Should we include the collections links on our product pages? Or are we running the risk of having too many links on a page?
Thanks again for your insight and help.
-
-
My first choice would be to stop using the tags altogether. If you need a few for legitimate sub-categories then you can just limit it to those few, but otherwise it's just a mess. You can read about how to remove tags on this Shopify help page. Any tag page that had external links (probably very few, if any) should get 301 redirected if you do this.
You could also choose to noindex,follow or robots.txt block the /all/ folder to keep those pages from being indexed if you want to leave them up for visitors (do they 'really' use them?).
Google is probably assigning value to those pages because of your internal links, which appear on every product page. It would be better to link to categories and other products instead, thus sending pagerank where you want it to go.
You could leave the links up and redirect the tag pages, as per your original question, but I feel that would be addressing the symptom (PR going into tag pages) rather than the cause (links to tag pages on the site).
Good luck!
-
Personally I would 301 the tag page "Products Tagged 'Knicks'" to the "New York Knicks Shirts" collections page . The only issue I can think of is that , will the collections be updated over time to add all the new items that might be potentially tagged as Knicks ?
So perhaps it might be better to keep the tag page for Knicks as the go to page for " Knicks TShirts ". You can edit the tag template to add custom banners and descriptions and I would also change the h1 tag on the tag page to say something more relevant than just " PRODUCTS "
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
-
Should I even do product page schema?
If I have no reviews/ratings on the page itself and special/limited time offers and just a regular product page with a standard price, is there any ability to do product schema with it getting flagged for errors? Google's Structured Markup Testing Tool threw me an error when I test it without any of those: | One of offers or review or aggregateRating should be provided. | And even if it's possible, is there any point?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SearchStan0 -
Home page vs inner page?
do you believe that the advantage of targeting a search term on the home page is now worse off than before? as I understand it ctr is a big factor now And as far as i can see if two pages are equal on page etc the better ctr will win out, the issue with the home page is the serp stars cannot be used hence the ctr on a product page will be higher? I feel if you where able to get a home page up quicker (1 year instead of two) you still lost out in the end due to the product page winning on ctr? do you think this is correct?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
What are best page titles for sub-domain pages?
Hi Moz communtity, Let's say a website has multiple sub-domains with hundreds and thousands of pages. Generally we will be mentioning "primary keyword & "brand name" on every page of website. Can we do same on all pages of sub-domains to increase the authority of website for this primary keyword in Google? Or it gonna end up as negative impact if Google consider as duplicate content being mentioned same keyword and brand name on every page even on website and all pages of sub domains? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
How do we avoid duplicate/thin content on +150,000 product pages?
Hey guys! We got a rather large product range (books) on our eCommerce site (+150,000 titles). We get book descriptions as meta data from our publishers, which we display on the product pages. This obviously is not unique, as many other sites display the same piece of description of the book. It is important for us to rank on those book titles, so my question to You is: How would you go about it? I mean, it seems like a rather unrealistic task to paraphrase +150,000 (and growing) book descriptions. As I see it, there are these options: 1. Don't display the descriptions on the product pages (however then those pages will get even thinner!)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jacob_Holm
2. Display the (duplicate) descriptions, but put no-index on those product pages in order not to punish the rest of the site (not really an option, though).
3. Hire student workers to produce unique product descriptions for all 150,000 products (seems like a huge and expensive task) But how would You solve such a challenge?
Thanks a lot! Cheers, Tommy.0 -
Unlimited Product Pages
While browsing through my Moz campaign, I noticed that my site is pulling up unlimited numbers of product pages even though no products appear on them. i.e. http://www.interstellarstore.com/star-trek-memorabilia?page=16 http://www.interstellarstore.com/star-trek-memorabilia?page=100 http://www.interstellarstore.com/star-trek-memorabilia?page=200 I have no ideal how to resolve this issue. I can't possible 301 an unlimited number of pages, and I can see this being a big SEO problem. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Putting "noindex" on a page that's in an iframe... what will that mean for the parent page?
If I've got a page that is being called in an iframe, on my homepage, and I don't want that called page to be indexed.... so I put a noindex tag on the called page (but not on the homepage) what might that mean for the homepage? Nothing? Will Google, Bing, Yahoo, or anyone else, potentially see that as a noindex tag on my homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Philip-DiPatrizio0 -
How do you transition a keyword rank from a home page to a sub-page on the site?
We're currently ranking #1 for a valuable keyword, but the result on the SERP is our home page. We're creating a new product page focused on this keyword to provide a better user experience and create more relevant content. What is the best way to make a smooth transition to make the product page rank #1 for the keyword instead of the home page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | buildasign0 -
Google swapped our website's long standing ranking home page for a less authoritative product page?
Our website has ranked for two variations of a keyword, one singular & the other plural in Google at #1 & #2 (for over a year). Keep in mind both links in serps were pointed to our home page. This year we targeted both variations of the keyword in PPC to a products landing page(still relevant to the keywords) within our website. After about 6 weeks, Google swapped out the long standing ranked home page links (p.a. 55) rank #1,2 with the ppc directed product page links (p.a. 01) and dropped us to #2 & #8 respectively in search results for the singular and plural version of the keyword. Would you consider this swapping of pages temporary, if the volume of traffic slowed on our product page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JingShack0