Custom URL's with Bigcommerce Issue (Is it worth it?)
-
We're building out a store in Bigcommerce, who for all intensive purposes is perfect for SEO besides the fact that you can not change the URL's to be custom. My question is, does this kill the SEO value of bigcommerce, despite everything else being great?
So for example the URL's for a category page would be something like this www.mysite.com/categories/keyword and the product URL's are pulled in by product name, so product URL's could be something like www.mysite.com/products/Product-Description-Long-223.html (notice the words will be capitalized and their is no way to remove the trailing .html)
I could go with Interspire (the liscenced version of Bigcommerce) or Magento so I can custom edit this stuff. But then its a lot more work for my employee's on the buildout.
-
Thanks, yea I can use canonicals with bigcommerce. I just wasn't sure how much the URL structure really influences the rankings of the page. Like if everything else is perfect, but there is one variable in there that isn't (ie having /categories/ in the URL) how much that would actually effect the results.
-
The question that matters is what does SEO need from URLs?
-
That they be static.
-
That they feature your keywords.
What does Big Commerce do?
-
Provide static URLs (at least, based on what you've shown; I'm not a salesman or anything and have no affiliation)
-
Features product name (which presumably you control, and can thus include long tail KWs).
Granted, it's slightly less easy to type out the product page URLs for anyone wanting to link (they need to remember the caps and .html) but that's the least of your issues. I'd imagine you can just set up a 301 to make the urls typed in redirect if they get the casing wrong.
Lastly, regarding custom URLs, consider scalability. If the store succeeds ... are you really going to give each product page a custom URL manually? Not likely... So it's not that important.
-
-
My company has been working with eCommerce storefronts for close to 7 years and this would be a deal killer for me. Out of all the shopping carts on the Market, Magneto is HANDS DOWN the greatest and offers the most scalability for clients bar none! It is more complicated to setup than most but once you have the hang of it you can get a store built out really quick and in the end its just so much better.
I personally, have worked with infopia, zencart, yahoo stores, volution, channel advisor (crooks), 3Dcarts, pinnicle cart and more.
Bottom line, URL Structure in eCommerce is as crucial as Title and Meta Descriptions.
-
I think you have answered your question already. This comes down to price over SEO value. Sure, the perfect pretty URL's would add something to the product and category listings pages, but depending on the competition in your market and the ongoing budget for Link Building this may not be an issue if you're on top of it all.
If you'd rather outlay a little more cost upfront, then it might be an idea to get it 100% from day 1
Hope this helps!!
Aaron
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
-
Tools for understanding customer behaviour
Hi Can anyone recommend any tools for understanding how people interact with a page? We use events in analytics and have previously used hot jar. I didn't know if there were any new ones? Thanks!
Web Design | | BeckyKey2 -
Duplicate Content? Designing new site, but all content got indexed on developer's sandbox
An ecommerce I'm helping is getting a complete redesign. Their developer had a sandbox version of their new site for design & testing. Several thousand products were loaded into the sandbox site. Then Google/Bing crawled and indexed the site (because developer didn't have a robots.txt), picking up and caching about 7,200 pages. There were even 2-3 orders placed on the sandbox site, so people were finding it. So what happens now?
Web Design | | trafficmotion
When the sandbox site is transferred to the final version on the proper domain, is there a duplicate content issue?
How can the developer fix this?0 -
May I know what's the "CSS Class" here?
ul.nav a#homelink { text-indent: -9999px; background: url('http://www.elegantthemes.com/preview/MyProduct/wp-content/themes/MyProduct/images/home-icon.png') no-repeat center 6px; padding: 0px; } ul.nav a#homelink span { display: block; padding: 5px 9px 8px 5px; width: 16px; } I'm having problems in adding back the "house" icon instead of a "Home" text in my menu. I don't what "CSS class" should I use to be added in the Home menu button (Appearance>Menu). I'm currently using a "MyProducts" Wordpress theme by ElegantThemes. Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | esiow20131 -
Need to hire a tech for find out why google spider can't access my site
Google spider can't access my site and all my pages are gone out of serps. I've called network solutions tech support and they say all is fine with the site which is wrong. does anyone know of a web tech who i can hire to fix this issue? Thanks, Ron
Web Design | | Ron100 -
E Commerce Product URL SEO
Hi, first question here. In response to Paddy's wonderful article and Rand's related article from 09 I've found myself asking this question. "www.home.co.uk/product" or "www.home.co.uk/category/product" As I'm currently reviewing the structure for so many of our e com sites the article comes at a great time. I'm going for home/category/product so I can optimise for a category, as category based searches are quite high and competitive. Yes some products can appear in 2 categories but I'm combating it with 301's or image based links. What are your thoughts.
Web Design | | PASSLtd0 -
Competitor Rockets to #1 and I'm looking at keyword stuffing. Will Google catch up with it?
We have a competitor whose home page rocketed up to number one, page one, on our key search term after they did a website redesign. They even beat out the original retailer for that position, as they are resellers of the product (not affiliate sales, resale in the secondary market.) They are the first to knock the original seller out of the #1 position. In the past couple of years that I have been doing in-house SEO, they have never ranked on page one for the term. I ran their site through the SEOmoz page grader for the specific search term, loading their page that is ranking, and found that they grade a “B,” but have some alerts for keyword stuffing, (the search term is on the home page 30+ times,) and they have eleven tags on said page. Aside from the two things listed above, they have pretty good site architecture on this new site, and are pretty well branded, etc. Should I expect Google to catch the keyword stuffing and eleven tags, and possibly adjust their rank? Will their keyword stuffing come back to bite them?
Web Design | | Ticket_King0 -
Landing Page/Home Page issues
Hi. I was speaking with my designer last night (we are setting up a new website) and we were discussing the design of our homepage, now the designer said he wanted the first page of the website to be a sort of landing page page were the visitor has to click and enter, im sure everyone has all come across these before. However, I am concerned as to the SEO implications of this? Any help guys?
Web Design | | CompleteOffice0 -
Are my duplicate meta titles and descriptions an issue ?
HelloMy website http://www.gardenbeet.com has been rebuilt using prestacart and there are 158 duplicate title and meta descriptions being reported by google.My developer advised the following Almost all the duplicates are due to the same page being accessible at the root and following the category heading. e.g; /75-vegetable-patio-planter-turquoise.html
Web Design | | GardenBeet
/patio-planters/75-vegetable-patio-planter-turquoise.html This is hard-wired into PrestaShop. Was the Canonical module (now disabled) responsible for the confusion by not including the category name? The Googlebot shouldn't be scanning the root versions now. I don't believe this to be a serious issue but I'd recommend a second opinion from someone more SEO savvy just to be sure.Opinions??0