How to fully index big ecommerce websites (that have deep catalog hierarchy)?
-
When building very large ecommerce sites, the catalog data can have millions of product SKUs and a massive quantity of hierarchical navigation layers (say 7-10) to get to those SKUs. On such sites, it can be difficult to get them to index substantially. The issue doesn’t appear to be product page content issues. The concern is around the ‘intermediate’ pages -- the many navigation layers between the home page and the product pages that are necessary for a user to funnel down and find the desired product. There are a lot of these intermediate pages and they commonly contain just a few menu links and thin/no content. (It's tough to put fresh-unique-quality content on all the intermediate pages that serve the purpose of helping the user navigate a big catalog.) We've played with NO INDEX, FOLLOW on these pages. But structurally it seems like a site with a lot of intermediate pages containing thin content can result in issues such as shallow site indexing, weak page rank, crawl budget issues, etc. Any creative suggestions on how to tackle this?
-
Yes, the links should come from your own website.
If you have a powerful site, creating sitewide links to several logical category pages within your product pages can be adequate.
If your site is new or not very strong yet then it may be best to grow the number of product pages in steps as your site is able to get them in the index and hold them in the index. A weak site will probably not be able to get 5,000,000 pages indexed. If your site is not powerful, attempting to do it usually results in a ranking decline on the original part of the site.
-
Thanks for the response. To clarify... you're suggesting we link internally from our highest PR pages to pages deep inside the catalog (ie. product pages)?
-
Link deep into the site at many different internal hubs from high PR pages. That forces spiders into the depths of the site and forces them to chew their way out through unindexed pages. These links must remain in place permanently if you want the site to stay in the index, because if Google goes too long without spidering a page it will forget about it.
A mistake that people often make is to try to place five million pages on a PR3 website. That will not work. Not enough spiders coming in. For a site like you are talking about you might need many dozen healthy PR6 links or hundreds of PR5 links and quite a bit of prayer. For a site as deep as yours you might need to link to hubs at multiple depths because Google does budget the amount of crawl that they will perform. The spiders will die down there.
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
-
Should my website be accessible by IP?
I have been doing some digging in to this today essentially triggered off by looking at the secure certificate on my site and comparing it to others as i have been seeing some security warnings on a random basis. I noticed that on all instances none of the other sites IP addresses re-direct to the website, whereas on my site it does. is re-directing the IP address to the website a big no-no?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WAWKA1 -
AMP pages for a responsive Ecommerce website?
Howdy guys, I'm wondering if AMP is worthwhile intergrating into a responsive e-commerce site? I'm under the impression that the benefits of AMP would be focused around speed, however it may come at the cost of conversion rate if it was to be delivered for product pages, etc. I'm presuming that even if AMP was on every page across a responsive ecommerce site, Google would only display AMP pages in the carousel for news articles, such as on the integrated blog? Any advice would be awesome! Thanks guys 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JAR8970 -
Acquired a company, what should be done with their website?
Hi, I work for a furniture company that essentially purchased another furniture store some time back a few years ago. However, this furniture store that was acquired had a website. The website has no existing pages anymore, only the homepage. The homepage has a message on it describing how it's been taken over and then links to our website. The spam score for the website is 8. I was wondering if there was something else we should do instead of the link, whether that be a straight 301 redirect or if we should have the link at all considering its score. I can provide more information and links if needed. Thanks in advance, Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdamEgarr0 -
301s being indexed
A client website was moved about six months ago to a new domain. At the time of the move, 301 redirects were setup from the pages on the old domain to point to the same page on the new domain. New pages were setup on the old domain for a different purpose. Now almost six months later when I do a query in google on the old domain like site:example.com 80% of the pages returned are 301 redirects to the new domain. I would have expected this to go away by now. I tried removing these URLs in webmaster tools but the removal requests expire and the URLs come back. Is this something we should be concerned with?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
Ecommerce URL's
I'm a bit divided about the URL structure for ecommerce sites. I'm using Magento and I have Canonical URLs plugin installed. My question is about the URL structure and length. 1st Way: If I set up Product to have categories in the URL it will appear like this mysite.com/category/subcategory/product/ - and while the product can be in multiple places , the Canonical URL can be either short or long. The advantage of having this URL is that it shows all the categories in the breadcrumbs ( and a whole lot more links over the site ) . The disadvantage is the URL Length 2nd Way: Setting up the product to have no category in the URL URL will be mysite.com/product/ Advantage: short URL. disadvantage - doesn't show the categories in the breadcrumbs if you link direct. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear1 -
Google Indexing Feedburner Links???
I just noticed that for lots of the articles on my website, there are two results in Google's index. For instance: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html and http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thewebhostinghero+(TheWebHostingHero.com) Now my Feedburner feed is set to "noindex" and it's always been that way. The canonical tag on the webpage is set to: rel='canonical' href='http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html' /> The robots tag is set to: name="robots" content="index,follow,noodp" /> I found out that there are scrapper sites that are linking to my content using the Feedburner link. So should the robots tag be set to "noindex" when the requested URL is different from the canonical URL? If so, is there an easy way to do this in Wordpress?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
External links from banned websites
Currently working with a client that has seen his rankings diminish after the penguin update. I've manually analyzed all his 600 backlinks and identified approximately 85 external links from websites that have been banned by Google. How do these sites affect his current rankings? Should i just disavow all these links using the Google disavow tool? Any comments would be highly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nick_Johansson0 -
How long until Sitemap pages index
I recently submitted an XML sitemap on Webmaster tools: http://www.uncommongoods.com/sitemap.xml Once Webmaster tools downloads it, how long do you typically have to wait until the pages index ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | znotes0