[Advice] Dealing with an immense URl structure full of canonicals with Budget & Time constraint
-
Good day to you Mozers,
I have a website that sells a certain product online and, once bought, is specifically delivered to a point of sale where the client's car gets serviced.
This website has a shop, products and informational pages that are duplicated by the number of physical PoS. The organizational decision was that every PoS were supposed to have their own little site that could be managed and modified.
Examples are:
- Every PoS could have a different price on their product
- Some of them have services available and some may have fewer, but the content on these service page doesn't change.
I get over a million URls that are, supposedly, all treated with canonical tags to their respective main page. The reason I use "supposedly" is because verifying the logic they used behind canonicals is proving to be a headache, but I know and I've seen a lot of these pages using the tag.
i.e:
- https:mysite.com/shop/ <-- https:mysite.com/pointofsale-b/shop
- https:mysite.com/shop/productA <-- https:mysite.com/pointofsale-b/shop/productA
The problem is that I have over a million URl that are crawled, when really I may have less than a tenth of them that have organic trafic potential.
Question is:
For products, I know I should tell them to put the URl as close to the root as possible and dynamically change the price according to the PoS the end-user chooses. Or even redirect all shops to the main one and only use that one.I need a short term solution to test/show if it is worth investing in development and correct all these useless duplicate pages. Should I use Robots.txt and block off parts of the site I do not want Google to waste his time on?
I am worried about: Indexation, Accessibility and crawl budget being wasted.
Thank you in advance,
-
Hey Chris!
Thanks a lot for your time. I did send you a PM the day after your original post, I will send you another :).
Thanks a lot for your additionnal advice. You're right about managing client's expectations and its crucial. You're pointing out some valid points and I will have to ponder about how I approach this whole situation.
Charles,
-
Hey Charles,
No problem, I've been out of the office most of the past week so I'm trying to catch up on a few of these now, sorry! I don't recall seeing any PMs either.
I feel weird to recommend shaving 3/4 of their site on which they put a lot of money in.
That's perfectly normal and I'd have the same reservations. If you do decide to go ahead with it though (and I'm absolutely not looking to push you into a decision either way, just providing the info) you can highlight the fact that paying a lot of money for a website doesn't make it inherently good. If those extra pages are providing no unique value then they're just a hindrance to their long-term goal of earning a return from that site via organic traffic.
It's a conversation we have semi-regularly with new clients. They think that because they just spent $20k on a new site, making changes to it is silly and a waste of the money they invested in the first place. "Sure it's broken but it was expensive"... I don't think search engines or users really care how much it cost
in the eyes of the client, it may come off as bold.
It certainly is bold and don't be fooled, there is a reasonable chance their rankings will get worse before they get better. In some cases when we perform a cleanup like this we'll see a brief drop before a steady improvement.
This doesn't happen all the time by any means, in fact we did a smaller scale version of this last week for two new clients and both have already started moving ahead over the weekend without a drop in rankings prior. It's really just about managing expectations and pitching the long term benefit over the short term fear.
Just be very careful in the way you project-manage it - be meticulous with updating internal links and 301 any pages that have external links pointing to them as well. You want to end up with a clean, efficient and crawlable website that retains as much value as possible.
You understand many sets of eyes are directed at them and a lot is to gain.
Also a very valid concern!
I'm probably not telling you anything you don't already know anyhow so don't think I'm trying to lecture you on how to do your job, just sharing my knowledge and anecdotal evidence on similar things.
-
Hey Chris!
Thanks for that lenghty response. It is very much appreciated and so is your offer for help. Let me check with some people to see if I can share the company's name.
[EDIT] Sent you a private msgOne of the reason I want to test the waters is, to be real honest, I feel weird to recommend shaving 3/4 of their site on which they put a lot of money in. I guess it comes down to reassuring them that these changes will be positive, but in the eyes of the client, it may come off as bold.
Another thing is, it is an international business that have different teams for different country. For more than 20 countries, they are the only one to try and sell their product online. You understand many sets of eyes are directed at them and a lot is to gain.
-
Hi Charles,
That's a tough one! I definitely see the motivation to test the waters here first before you go spending time on it but it will likely take less time than you think and either way, the user experience will be significantly better once you're done so I'd expect that either way, your time/dev investment would likely be viable.
I suppose you could block certain sections via Robots and wait to measure the results but I'd be more inclined to throw on the gloves and get elbow deep!
You've already mentioned the issues the current structure causes so you are aware of them which is great. With those in mind, focus on the user experience. What is it they're looking for on your site? How would they expect to find it? Can they find the solution with as few clicks as practical?
Rand did a Whiteboard Friday recently on Cleaning up the Cruft which was a great overview of the broader areas you can often trim your site back down to size. For me anyway, the aim is to have as few pages on the site as practical. If a page(s), category, tag etc doesn't need to exist then just remove it!
It's hard to say or to give specific advice here without seeing your site but chances are if you were to sit down and physically map out your website you'd find a lot of redundancy that, once fixed, would cut your million pages down to a significantly more manageable number. A recent example of this for us was a client who had a bunch of redundant blog categories and tags as well as multiple versions of some URLs due to poor internal linking. We cut their total URL volume from over 300 to just 78 and that alone was enough to significantly improve their search visibility.
I'd be happy to take a closer look at this one if you're willing to share your URL, though I understand if you're not. Either way, the best place to start here will be reviewing your site structure and seeing if it truly makes sense.
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
-
Issue with AMP pages
Hello, We have implemented AMP on our blog pages, but now some of the Web pages are also being shown like AMP pages. ( no footer and no navigation ) What could have gone wrong ? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Johnroger0 -
Remove Product & Category from URLS in Wordpress
Does anyone have experience removing /product/ and /product-category/, etc. from URLs in wordpress? I found this link from Wordpress which explains that this shouldn't be done, but I would like some opinions of those who have tried it please. https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/removing-product-product-category-or-shop-from-the-urls/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Is it bad I have a cluster of canonical urls that 301 re-direct?
Just went through a migration. We have a group of canonical URLs that are NOT the preferred url, but 301 re-direct to the preferred URL. Does this essentially "break even" and the incorrect canonical URL becomes obsolete? And/or would this be considered potentially bad and confusing for bots?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lunavista-comm0 -
Changing URL structure of date-structured blog with 301 redirects
Howdy Moz, We've recently bought a new domain and we're looking to change over to it. We're also wanting to change our permalink structure. Right now, it's a WordPress site that uses the post date in the URL. As an example: http://blog.mydomain.com/2015/01/09/my-blog-post/ We'd like to use mod_rewrite to change this using regular expressions, to: http://newdomain.com/blog/my-blog-post/ Would this be an appropriate solution? RedirectMatch 301 /./././(.) /blog/$1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanOBrien0 -
Doubts with URL's structure
Hi guys i have some doubts with the correct URL structure for a new site. The question is about how show the city, the district and also the filters. I would do that: www.domain.com/category/city/disctict but maybe is better do that: **www.domain.com/category/city-district ** I also have 3 filters that are "individual/colective" "indoor/outdoor" and "young/adult" but that are not really interesting for the querys so where and how i put this filtters? At the end of the url showing these: **www.domain.com/cateogry/city/district#adult#outdoor#colective ** ? Well really i don't know what to do with the filters. Check if you could help me with that please. I also have a lof of interest in knowing if maybe is better use this combination **www.domain.com/category-city or domain.com/category/city **and know about the diference. Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | omarmoscatt0 -
Which index page should I canonical to?
Hello! I'm doing a routine clean up of my code and had a question about the canonical tag. On the index page, I have the following: I have never put any thought into which index path is the best to use. http://www.example.com http://www.example.com/ http://www.example.com/index.php Could someone shed some light on this for me? Does it make a difference? Thanks! Ryan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ryan_Phillips1 -
Site Structure Question
Hi All, Got a question about site structure, I currently have a website where everything is hosted on the root of the domain. See example below: site.com/men site.com/men-shorts site.com/men-shorts-[product name] I want to change the structure to site.com/men/shorts/[product-name] I have asked a couple of SEOs and some agree with me that the structure needs to be changed and some say that as long as I dictate the structure with internal links and breadcrumbs the URL structure doesn't matter... What do you guys think? Many thanks, Carlos
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0 -
Canonical URL Tag Usage
Hi there, I have a .co.uk website and a .ie website, which have the exact same content on both, should I put a canonical tag on both websites, on every page? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780