Product Documentation Causing 23-40K issues
-
One of my biggest hurdles at my company is our Product Documentation library, which houses thousands of pages of publicly accessible and indexed content on old and new versions of our product. Every time a product name changes the URL changes, causing a 404, so I typically have 100s of 404s every few months from this site. It's housed off our main domain. We have 23,000+ Duplicate Pages, 40,000 missing meta descriptions, and 38,000 due to this library. It is not built the same as our main content, with page titles and meta descriptions, so everything is defaulted and duplicate. I'm trying to make a case that this is an issue, especially as we migrate our site next year to a new CMS.
Does anyone have any suggestions for dealing with this issue in the short term and long term? Is it worth asking the owners of the section of content to develop page titles and meta descriptions on 40,000 pieces of content? They do not see the value of SEO and the issues this can cause.
It needs to be publicly accessible, but it's not highly ranked content. It's really for customers who want to know more about the product. But I worry it is hurting other parts of our site, with the absurd amount of duplicate content, meta, and page title issues.
-
Hi there,
As far as your platform goes, product name changes simply shouldn't be causing 404s and this can be (relatively) easily bypassed by introducing the product id to the end of the URL. The name can then change but the product id remains the identifier for the product to load on the page.
With regards to your 40K pages without meta titles or descriptions, it's going to be almost impossible to fix that manually. It sounds as though you need to establish a business case, which could be done by fixing a few hundred of them (based on the ones that get the most traffic) and seeing if it has any improvement. This might not have an impact though as it sounds as though they aren't doing well in SEO as it is, although I agree there's a chance that these poorly optimised pages might be hurting your overall rankings.
The challenge you face sounds like more political/strategic than technical though. Either SEO has actual/potential value to your business or it doesn't. If content producers aren't versed in SEO or focused on maintaining it or producing optimised pages and content then you probably have an uphill battle ahead of you to get them to focus on it.
Good luck,
George
-
Hi Caitlin,
Unfortunately, the site is structured in a way that anytime there is a change to a product version or name, a new path is created in our CMS (which is an old system called Vignette) and a new URL is created and the other is broken. Because there are 100s of these happening with each new product release, I get resistance from the web developers on my redirect requests. One reason being they'd have to do this manually each time, the other being site performance concerns. I had to really push to get the / vs non-trailing slash versions of the higher ranking pages on our site redirected and that wasn't nearly as many pages as this library.
I know my question is pretty broad. I'm just curious if someone out there has experienced similar issues and how they made the case that it needs to be fixed? Or if redirects is the only answer, will that many redirects negatively affect performance? Because we are moving to a new CMS where hopefully this won't be as big of an issue, is it best to take the hit now? As we migrate, all those links will eventually be broken. And trying to make the case to redirect 40,000 URLs might be even harder.
Because these are low-ranking pages, should I suggest removing this library from the website's root domain?
-
Hello!
Unfortunately it is difficult to give you a concrete answer without an understanding of your CMS and website structure. However, one thing did stand out to me. You mentioned above that you receive 100s of 404s every few months. Is there any reason why you are not implementing 301 redirects for these? When a 301 redirect is set up if a user where to try to navigate to a page that 404s they would be automatically redirected to another closely related page instead.
^Caitlin
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
-
Duplicate content issue on Magento platform
We have a lot of duplicate pages (600 urls) on our site (total urls 800) built on the Magento e-commerce platform. We have the same products in a number of different categories that make it easy for people to choose which product suits their needs. If we enable the canonical fix in Magento will it dramatically reduce the number of pages that are indexed. Surely with more pages indexed (even though they are duplicates) we get more search results visibility. I'm new to this particular SEO issue. What do the SEO community have to say on this matter. Do we go ahead with the canonical fix or leave it?
Technical SEO | | PeterDavies0 -
301 vs 500 Errors for discontinued products
I have a client that has a around 15 "products" (they are pages containing details of the products rather than e-Commerce products) that have been discontinued. The client has suggested 301s but unless the alternative products are replacement products am I correct that we should be using a 500 error?
Technical SEO | | MentorDigital0 -
URL Structure for Product Pages
Hi Moz Community. I'm in need of some URL structure advice for product pages. We currently have ~4,000+ products and I'm trying to determine whether I need a new URL structure from the previous site owners. There are two current product URL structures that exist in our website: 1.http://www.example.com/bracelets/gold-bracelets/1-1-10-ct-diamond-tw-slip-on-bangle-14k-pink-gold-gh-i1-i2/ (old URL structure)
Technical SEO | | IceIcebaby
2. http://www.example.com/gemstone-bracelet-prd-bcy-121189/ (new URL structure) The problem is that half of our products are still in the old structure (no one moved them forward), but at the same time I'm not sure if the new structure is optimized as much as possible. Every single gemstone bracelet, or whatever product will have the same url structure, only being unique with the product number at the end. Would it be better to change everything over to more product specific URLS. I.e. example.com/topaz-gemstone-dangle-bracelet. Thanks for your help!
-Reed0 -
Development Website Duplicate Content Issue
Hi, We launched a client's website around 7th January 2013 (http://rollerbannerscheap.co.uk), we originally constructed the website on a development domain (http://dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk) which was active for around 6-8 months (the dev site was unblocked from search engines for the first 3-4 months, but then blocked again) before we migrated dev --> live. In late Jan 2013 changed the robots.txt file to allow search engines to index the website. A week later I accidentally logged into the DEV website and also changed the robots.txt file to allow the search engines to index it. This obviously caused a duplicate content issue as both sites were identical. I realised what I had done a couple of days later and blocked the dev site from the search engines with the robots.txt file. Most of the pages from the dev site had been de-indexed from Google apart from 3, the home page (dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk, and two blog pages). The live site has 184 pages indexed in Google. So I thought the last 3 dev pages would disappear after a few weeks. I checked back late February and the 3 dev site pages were still indexed in Google. I decided to 301 redirect the dev site to the live site to tell Google to rank the live site and to ignore the dev site content. I also checked the robots.txt file on the dev site and this was blocking search engines too. But still the dev site is being found in Google wherever the live site should be found. When I do find the dev site in Google it displays this; Roller Banners Cheap » admin dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk/ A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more. This is really affecting our clients SEO plan and we can't seem to remove the dev site or rank the live site in Google. In GWT I have tried to remove the sub domain. When I visit remove URLs, I enter dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk but then it displays the URL as http://www.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk/dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk. I want to remove a sub domain not a page. Can anyone help please?
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
SEOMOZ is giving me a number of duplicate content warnings related to pages that have an email a friend and/or email when back in stock versions of a page. I thought I had those blocked via my robots.txt file which contains the following... Disallow: /EmailaFriend.asp Disallow: /Email_Me_When_Back_In_Stock.asp I had thought that the robot.txt file would solve this issue. Anyone have any ideas?
Technical SEO | | WaterSkis.com0 -
How do i raise my product pages authority - ecommerce
hi, just started here and going through my website to make sure everything is fine and relevant to the search terms i am aiming for. However i notice a lot of my pages have an authority of 1 which clearly isnt acceptable! how do i best go to modify this so the authority is risen?
Technical SEO | | GarethEJones0 -
Aspx filters causing duplicate content issues
A client has a url which is duplicated by filters on the page, for example: - http://www.example.co.uk/Home/example.aspx is duplicated by http://www.example.co.uk/Home/example.aspx?filter=3 The client is moving to a new website later this year and is using an out-of-date Kentico CMS which would need some development doing to it in order to enable implementation of rel canonical tags in the header, I don't have access to the server and they have to pay through the nose everytime they want the slightest thing altering. I am trying to resolve this duplicate content issue though and am wondering what is the best way to resolve it in the short term. The client is happy to remove the filter links from the page but that still leaves the filter urls in Google. I am concerned that a 301 redirect will cause a loop and don't understand the behaviour of this type of code enough. I hope this makes sense, any advice appreciated.
Technical SEO | | travelinnovations0 -
Duplicate title issue
During the crwal SEO moz found duplicate title problems with quite a good number of pages. This was because my site has test questions like http://www.skill-guru.com/12/scjp-5-mock-test/questions and when user does next or previous, they can traverse to different pages but the title and descrition would remain same. How can this probkem be resolved ?
Technical SEO | | skill-guru2