E-commerce site structure & link juice: Bouncing off an idea
-
Hi guys,
Question from a new-comer in SEO. Summary of the situation:
- potential customers are searching for a generic product category (buy mountainbike) more often than a brand in that category (Specialized MTB).
- And the latter is searched more often than a specific product ('some specific product from Specialized brand').
- Both the brand pages and product pages are not ranking good
Then would it be a good idea to have the category pages only link to the brand pages? They may show the products, but the links wouldn't pass link juice. I'm not even sure if that is technically possible, but I wanted to figure out the merit first.
I'm hoping this would support the brand pages to rank better as they take in more volume. Please do feel free to teach me!
-
I'm still a little confused. Perhaps because we are thinking of different things when we say "category page"?
I think of "category page" as a special page in the flow a customer goes thru when they start on your home page. Like this: Home page (has links to all the categories) >>> Category page (has links to all the products in that category) >>> Product page (has complete description and the Buy button)
So in my view, it is perfectly normal for the Category page to have a link going out to each Product page it serves. That might be 5 products or it might be 50 products.
If you feel there are too many products showing on the Category page, then you can use Sub-Categories to decrease the number of links. Like this: Home page >>> Category page (has links to all the sub-category pages) >>> Sub-Category page (split logically, like Men's bikes and Women's Bikes, or Under $200 and $200 to $400 and Over $400, etc) >>> Product page
You may also want to check with your e-commerce system provider. If they don't have an arrangement that you like, there are lots of other e-commerce systems out there...
-
Thanks a lot Dana. And thank you for going beyond the question.
We offer vouchers for writing a review, but there's only a handfull of reviewed products per category.
Where could I find inspiration to make our brand & product pages more compelling? I can't make the question more specific atm as there is still a lot in the "I don't know that I don't know" quadrant
-
Thanks for your answers.
It's definitely a normal situation. However, in the current situation the category page shows the product, each product box contains a link to the product page.
So a category page with 50 products will have 50 links plus links to other categories in the menu and so on.
-
To clarify, my comment was not a suggestion, just a description of what is technically possible given Peter's original post. Hence my warning about using nofollow extensively for internal links.
Regards,
Chris
-
I agree with Gregory that this is a very typical ecommerce scenario. It's also very common to see the search volume greater for the generic terms and then less and less as things become more specific (down to specific models of bikes, for example). I disagree with Chris' suggestion regarding the use of the "nofollow" attribute, here's a Matt Cutts video explaining why: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022462.html - Matt Cutts reiterates, point blank, "I would not 'nofollow' internal links." [Period]
I would take a long hard look at the brand and product pages and try to figure out how to make them more compelling. Do you have customer reviews? Are they being cultivated (i.e. collected, posted, requested...regularly)? Are your product pages getting social shares? If not, spend some time cultivating that. Without seeing one of the pages, my best guess is that there are 5-10 things that you could do right away to make those pages stickier and more compelling. Do that. Don't waste your time trying to sculpt PageRank.
Just my 2 cents! Hope it's a little helpful.
Dana
-
Hi Peter,
Like Gregory said, this is a fairly standard arrangement for large ecommerce sites. Regarding the passing of link juice, you can use NoFollow links to cut off the flow of link juice and concentrate the flow towards a few pages that you want to rank. However, be careful about using too much NoFollow linking internally because you want to make sure your site gets crawled properly.
Hope this helps,
Chris
-
Hi Peter. Maybe I'm reading your description wrong, but it sounds like a pretty standard ecommerce arrangement.
Is the following true?
Search Volume (ranked highest to lowest):
- Generic Products (mountainbike, commuter bike, racing bike, etc)
- Product Brands (Schwinn mountainbike, Trek mountainbike, Hurley mountainbike, etc)
- Brand Models (Scwhinn 851, Schwinn 3400, Schwinn 4xtc, etc)
Page linking plan in question: ( >>> means links going to a collection of pages)
Generic Product page >>> Product Brand pages
Product Brand page >>> Brand Model pages
Although this is a pretty typical ecommerce arrangement, I personally think it is not the best plan for sites only selling a few products. When there are only a few products I think it is better to go straight from the Home page to the specific product pages.
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
-
Google Indexed Site A's Content On Site B, Site C etc
Hi All, I have an issue where the content (pages and images) of Site A (www.ericreynolds.photography) are showing up in Google under different domains Site B (www.fastphonerepair.com), Site C (www.quarryhillvet.com), Site D (www.spacasey.com). I believe this happened because I installed an SSL cert on Site A but didn't have the default SSL domain set on the server. You were able to access Site B and any page from Site A and it would pull up properly. I have since fixed that SSL issue and am now doing a 301 redirect from Sites B, C and D to Site A for anything https since Sites B, C, D are not using an SSL cert. My question is, how can I trigger google to re-index all of the sites to remove the wrong listings in the index. I have a screen shot attached so you can see the issue clearer. I have resubmitted my site map but I'm not seeing much of a change in the index for my site. Any help on what I could do would be great. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cwscontent
Eric TeVM49b.png qPtXvME.png1 -
One site, two blogs, URL structure?
I address a two sided market: consumer research and school fundraising. Essentially parents answer research surveys to generate proceeds for their school. My site will have a landing page at www.centiment.co that directs users to two different sub-landing pages, one related to research and one related to school fundraising. I am going to create two blogs and I am wondering if I should run off one installation of wordpress.org or two? The goal here is to optimize SEO. Separate URL paths by topic are clean but they require two installations of wordpress.org www.centiment.co/research/blog www.centiment.co/fundraising/blog If were to use one installation of wordpress it would be www.centiment.co/blog and then I would have a category for fundraising and a category for research. This is a little simpler. My concern is that it will confuse google and damage my SEO given general blog posts about fundraising are far different then those about research. Any suggestions? Again I don't want to compromise my SEO as I'm creating a blog to improve my SEO. Any insights are much appreciated. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kurtw14
Kurt0 -
Will I lose Link Juice when implementing a Reverse Proxy?
My company is looking at consolidating 5 websites that it has running on magento, wordpress, drupal and a few other platforms on to the same domain. Currently they're all on subdomains but we'd like to consolidate the subdomains to folders for UX and SEO potential. Currently they look like this: shop.example.com blog.example.com uk.example.com us.example.com After the reverse proxy they'll look like this: example.com/uk/ example.com/us/ example.com/us/shop example.com/us/blog I'm curious to know how much link juice will be lost in this switch. I've read a lot about site migration (especially the Moz example). A lot of these guides/case studies just mention using a bunch of 301's but it seems they'd probably be using reveres proxies as well. My questions are: Is a reverse proxy equal to or worse/better than a 301? Should I combine reverse proxy with a 301 or rel canonical tag? When implementing a reverse proxy will I lose link juice = ranking? Thanks so much! Jacob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jacob.young.cricut0 -
How should I manage duplicate content caused by a guided navigation for my e-commerce site?
I am working with a company which uses Endeca to power the guided navigation for our e-commerce site. I am concerned that the duplicate content generated by having the same products served under numerous refinement levels is damaging the sites ability to rank well, and was hoping the Moz community could help me understand how much of an impact this type of duplicate content could be having. I also would love to know if there are any best practices for how to manage this type of navigation. Should I nofollow all of the URLs which have more than 1 refinement used on a category, or should I allow the search engines to go deeper than that to preserve the long tail? Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FireMountainGems0 -
Best solution for facets in ecommerce store for optimum link juice distribution?
Now I have facets setup with ajax and ajax just adding parameter #facet1... at end of URL and I have setup canonical so that domain.com/category/#facet1 refers to
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
domain.com/category/ Would you make the facet links no-follow or better better not to add no-follow for better link juice distribution?
Would you hide the whole facet block from google and if so how? Any thoughts?0 -
301's & Link Juice
So lets say we have a site that has 0 page rank (kind of new) has few incoming links, nothing significant compared to the other sites. Now from what I understand link juice flows throughout the site. So, this site is a news site, and writes sports previews and predictions and what not. After a while, a game from 2 months gets 0 hits, 0 search queries, nobody cares. Wouldn't it make sense to take that type of expired content and have it 301 to a different page. That way the more relevant content gets the juice, thus giving it a better ranking... Just wondering what everybody's thought its on this link juice thing, and what am i missing..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ravashjalil0 -
Question about best approach to site structure
I am curious if anyone can share some advice. I am working on planning architecture for a tour company. The key piece of the content strategy will be providing details on each of the tour destinations, with associated profiles for each city within those destinations. Lots of content, which should be great for the SEO strategy. With regards to the architecture, I have a ‘destinations’ section on the Website where users can access each of the key destinations served by the tour company. My question is – from a planning perspective I can organize my folder structure in a few different ways. http://www.companyurl.com/destinations/touring-regions/cities/ or http://www.companyurl.com/destinations/ http://www.companyurl.com/touring-regionA/ http://www.companyurl.com/touring-regionB/cities-profile/ I am curious if anyone has an opinion on what might perform best in terms of the site structure from an SEO perspective. My fear is taking all of this rich content and placing it so many tiers down in the architecture of the site. Any advice that could be offered would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VERBInteractive0 -
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