An Infrastructure Change for a Large eCommerce Site - Any advice?
-
Hello Mozers,
We're currently under going quite a large infrastructure change to our website and I wouldn't to hear your thoughts on the type of things we should be careful of.
We currently have close to 4,000 individual products each with their own page. The seo work is then driven behind certain pages which house a catalog display of groups of products. The groups are done by style. An example is we have a page called "Style A" which displays 8 different colours of style A. We then seo the style A page and the individual items received minimal seo work.
The change would involve having one individual product page for each style but on that page the user would have the ability to purchase the different colours/variations via menus. This will result in approximately a %70 reduction in the size of our site (as several products will no longer be published)
The things we are currently concerned with are:
1. The lose of equity to those unwanted 'style A' pages - I think a series of careful planned 301s will be the solution.
2. Possible loss of long tail traffic to the individual products which might not be caught by one individual page per style.
3. Internal link structure will need to be monitored to make sure that we're still highlight the most important pages as well, important.
Sorry for the long post, it's a difficult change to explain without revealing the clients name - any other things we should be thinking about would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks
Nigel
-
1. The lose of equity to those unwanted 'style A' pages - I think a series of careful planned 301s will be the solution.
If you redirect the discarded pages you might have a gain in equity.
2. Possible loss of long tail traffic to the individual products which might not be caught by one individual page per style.
Actually, with lots more words on a page you might have a gain in long tail traffic. The only way to know is to try it... just saying this because it might not be a loss.
More important, you might be moving away from a potential duplicate content problem as these pages might be very similar.
3. Internal link structure will need to be monitored to make sure that we're still highlight the most important pages as well, important.
This job is always present.
-
Your concerns are certainly valid, but in my opinion, I think you should definitely go forwards with your ideas. Especially in the post-Panda world, we're seeing Google really reward simplicity in design and infrastructure. Moreover, I think consolidating all of the different colors of one style onto one page makes the most sense for the users - in terms of creating an intuitive user experience and creating a faster and smoother browsing experience.
301 redirects are the right move for the product pages that you phase out. I think you will find link building and SEO work on the product level much easier with less pages to focus on. As far as the long-tail traffic loss implications, this is a valid concern, but obviously you can have a list of the different available colors on each product page. I would also beef up my long-tail optimization with a push for user generated content in the form of user reviews. If you don't already accept these, consider doing so. If you do accept these, how about a promotion of some type to stimulate a big push to accrue some more. You can have users select the color of the item they are reviewing in order to get those terms on the page more frequently.
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
-
Why is this url redirecting to our site?
I was doing an audit on our site and searching for duplicate content using some different terms from each of our pages. I came across the following result: www.sswug.org/url/32639 redirects to our website. Is that normal? There are hundreds of these url's in google all with the exact same description. I thought it was odd. Any ideas and what is the consequence of this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
Should eCommerce Canonicalize to CMS
We have inherited a site that has a Joomla CMS "showroom" front-end and a Magento "store room" for check out etc. Question - As the site's main pages are in the CMS section should we: make all Magento product pages canonical to the main sections/product pages within the CMS (even though there are no duplicate content issues) "No index" the product pages Index but indicate low page value in sitemap Do something else? 🙂 Thanks for any and all input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheNorthernOffice790 -
Changing the spellings of titles and URl changes
Hi, Changing the spellings of titles and URl changes We identifies 500+ titles with some issues like spellings and punctuations and short or too long. We want to change them, but the titles are connected with the URL's when we change the titles the URl's change as well. My questions are 1. Is it a good way to change them all in one shot or do few daily 2. As the URl's change will Google index drop the old pages as they would be 404 and index new ones? 3. Will we have chances to have drop in traffic due to this? 4. Any way to redirect? as we have a Drupal website Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Google penalized site--307/302 redirect to new site-- Via intermediate link—New Site Ranking Gone..?
Hi, I have a site that google had placed a manual link penalty on, let’s call this our
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robdob2013
company site. We tried and tried to get the penalty removed, and finally gave up and purchased another name. It was our understanding that we could safely use either a 302 or 307 temporary redirect in order to redirect people from our old domain to our new one.. We put this into place several months and everything seemed to be going along well. Several days ago I noticed that our root domain name had dropped for our selected keyword from position 9 to position 65. Upon looking into our GWT under “Links to Your site” , I have found many, many, many links which were pointed to our old google penalized domain name to our new root domain name each of this links had a sub heading “Via this intermediate link -> Our Old Domain Google Penalized Domain Name” In light of all of this going on, I have removed the 307/302 redirect, have brought the
old penalized site back which now consists of a basic “we’ve moved page” which is linked to our new site using a rel=’nofollow’ I am hoping that -1- Our new domain has probably not received a manual penalty and is most likely now
received some sort of algorithmic penalty, and that as these “intermediate links” will soon disappear because I’m no longer doing the 302/307 from the old sight to the new. Do you think this is the case now or that I now have a new manual penalty place on the new
domain name.. I would very much appreciate any comments and/or suggestions as to what I should or can do to get this fixed. I need to still keep the old domain name as this address has already been printed on business cards many, many years ago.. Also on a side note some of the sub pages of the new root domain are still ranking very
well, it’s only the root domain that is now racking awfully.. Thanks,0 -
SEO for an exponentially growing site?
Hey Mozers! I was having a quick chat with a friend the other day on doing SEO for a site that grows in page size at an exponential rate and was just wondering how you would go about optimizing it? The example that we used would be a site that allowed users to upload videos and then have people vote on two videos against each other. So, if there are 100 uploaded videos and each of them are pared up with the other 99 to create a unique voting/battle page which has it's own unique URL, the site can get very large, VERY quickly. Meaning if just one more video is uploaded there would be How exactly would you go about optimizing the site? My biggest area of confusion would be generating sitemaps. I'm aware of best practices with large sitemaps (i.e. having a sitemap of sitemaps, not going over 50k in entries per sitemap etc..) But, how would you go about creating the sitemaps for this website if it's growing at an exponential rate, if at all? If you have any other questions feel free to ask and I'll clarify it. Thanks! 😃 **TL;DR How would you optimize a site that grows at an exponential rate? **
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JordanChoo0 -
Is this site legit?
http://www.gglpls.com/ is this site legit? Submit website to google + directory?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Site comparison - what is wrong with me?
www.bcspeakers.com/ vs www.psbspeakers.com/ with the search term "speakers" why does BC speakers show up in around #50-60 and PSB is not in the top #1000? From all metrics on seomoz PSB kicks BC in every area by a large margine! can anyone see why BC is listed for that keyword and PSB is not?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevin48030 -
Optimize a Classifieds Site
Hi, I have a classifieds website and would like to optimize it. The issues/questions I have: A Classifieds site has, say, 500 cities. Is it better to create separate subdomains for each city (http://city_name.site.com) or subdirectory (http://site.com/city_name)? Now in each city, there will be say 50 categories. Now these 50 categories are common across all the cities. Hence, the layout and content will be the same with difference of latest ads from each city and name of the city and the urls pointing to each category in the relevant city. The site architecture of a classifieds site is highly prone to have major content which is not really a duplicate content. What is the best way to deal with this situation? I have been hit by Panda in April 2011 with traffic going down 50%. However, the traffic since then has been around same level. How to best handle the duplicate content penalty in case with site like a classifieds site. Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ketan90