Forced to remove Categories with high volume & revenue
-
Hi everyone
I've been forced to remove level 4 & 5 categories (e.g. example.com/level-2/level-3**/level-4/level-5/**) from our website, even though they're getting plenty of traffic, revenue and are ranking for some of our keywords. The argument is customers were using refinement/filters more than clicking into categories, and a new backend system is coming into the business and these need to be removed anyway.
We've done this before and seen a drop in visibility, revenue & traffic in these areas, but we're going ahead with another batch of removals anyway. I was wondering if anyone has any experience in fixing a problem like this? I've been told the categories will not be returning and have to 301 them, so need to find a workaround to get eligible for ranking for these Keywords again.
I've been looking at using the refinements to make it look like a category (change URL to a clean one, update Page Title, Meta Description, H1, remove text from core page, when refinement is clicked) but not sure what kind of knock-on effects this will have, if it even works!
Hope you can help! I've probably missed some details so let me know if you need more info!!!
Thanks
-
Very hard to prove these things before they're done - good luck with getting buy-in for what you need to do and in undoing the worst of the damage.
-
Thanks Will! Yep sounds similar to what I've sent onto Development, where the filters are actually those sub-category pages. Unfortunately they think it's going to be a huge amount of work, so now I need to show the value of creating these pages before they start working on it. From the Macro point of view, unfortunately, I had no choice and just had to redirect, which are all in place now. Painful to do when you know it's going to damage the performance, and after a couple of weeks it looks like the stats showing it already has
But great to have your feedback, will definitely give weight for my pitch to get those filters working for us! The top-level idea might actually be a great workaround for now too!
-
Hi Frankie,
Sorry for the slow reply to this one. I hope it's still relevant to offer some thoughts.
First, at the top level, I would say that the stated reasons don't necessarily mean that you should not have the kinds of pages you describe. My first preference would be to modify the functionality so that the filters you describe users actually using are those sub-category pages. Even if this meant changing URLs (and hence 301 redirecting the pages you currently have), it is possible to have filter / facet pages be indexable and have unique URLs and meta information.
If that's not possible for whatever reason, I would separate my efforts into the micro and the macro:
- Micro: apply a 80:20 or 90:10 rule to the pages that you are losing - find the small number of most important and highest traffic / conversion pages and find a way to keep versions of those pages (again - even if you have to 301 redirect them, you could create them as static content pages targeting those keywords or something if you had to)
- Macro: where you simply have no choice but to lose these pages, I think your best bet will be to redirect them to the absolutely best (/ next best!) page on the site for those queries - these might be other (sub-)category pages or they might be individual products or content pages, but at least for the highest traffic end, it'd be worth specific research effort to identify the best redirect targets
One final thought: it's not always the case that the URL has to represent every level in the hierarchy. I don't know your underlying technology, but it might be possible to recreate some of these sub-categories as top-level categories if products are allowed by your CMS to be in more than one category at once. I wrote this article about the difference between URL structures and site architecture that might give more clarity on what I mean here.
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 did Google cache & index a different domain than my own?
We own www.homemenorca.com, a real estate website based in Spain. Pages from this domain are not being indexed: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.homemenorca.com&oq=site%3Awww.homemenorca.com&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58j69i59l2.3504j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8Please notice that the URLs are Home Menorca, but the titles are not Home Menorca, they are Fincas Mantolan, a completely different domain and company: http://www.fincasmantolan.com/. Furthermore, when we look at Google's cache of Home Menorca, we see a different website: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.homemenorca.com%2Fen&oq=cache%3Awww.homemenorca.com%2Fen&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58j69i59.1311j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8We reviewed Google Search Console, Google Fetch, the canonical tags, the XML sitemap, and many more items. Google Search Console accepted our XML sitemap, but is only indexing 5-10% of the pages. Google is fetching and rendering the pages properly. However, we are not seeing the correct content being indexed in Google. We have seen issues with page loading times, loading content longer than 4 seconds, but are unsure why Google would be indexing a different domain.If you have suggestions or thoughts, we would very much appreciate it.Additional Language Issue:When a user searches "Home Menorca" from America or the UK with "English" selected in their browser as their default language, they are given a Spanish result. It seems to have accurate hreflang annotations within the head section on the HTML pages, but it is not working properly. Furthermore, Fincas Mantolan's search result is listed immediately below Home Menorca's Spanish result. We believe that if we fix the issue above, we will also fix the language issue. Please let us know any thoughts or recommendations that can help us. Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CassG12340 -
Duplicate ecommerce sites, SEO implications & others?
We have an established eCom site built out with custom php, dedicated SERPs, traffic, etc.. The question has arisen on how to extend commerce on social and we have found a solution with Shopify. In order to take advantage of this, we'd need to build out a completely new site in Shopify and would have to have the site live in order to have storefronts on Pinterest and Twitter. Aside from the obvious problem with having two databases, merchant processing, etc, does anyone know whether there are SEO implications to having two live sites with duplicate products? Could we just disavow a Shopify store in Webmaster Tools? Any other thoughts or suggestions? TIA!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PAC31350 -
Pros & Cons of Switching Your Main Domain to Mask Links & Combat EMDs
Hello Mozzers, I'd love to receive some advice for a client of mine and insights you may have regarding pros and cons on changing your main domain to mask links. Within a competitive niche there are about 4 different sites that routinely rank 1-4. Our site crushes all three on just about all metrics except we have a high volume of nofollow links and our site remains at #4. Our site is much older so we have significantly more links than these smaller sites, including pre-penguin penalty spammy links (like blog comments that make up 50+ nofollow links from 1 comment per domain). Obviously we are attempting to remove any toxic links and disavow, however the blog comment nofollow links skew our anchor text ratio pretty intensely and we are worried that we aren't going to make a dent in removing this type of links. Just disavowing them hasn't worked alone, so if we are unable to remove the bulk of these poor quality links (nofollow, off-topic anchor text, etc..) we are considering 301 redirecting the current domain to a new one. We've seen success with this in a couple of scenarios, but wanted to see other insights as to if masking links with a 301 could send fresh signals and positively effect rankings. Also wanted to mention, 2 of the 3 competitors that outrank us have EMD's for the primary keywords. Appreciate your time, insights, and advice on this matter.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Leadhub0 -
SEO Impact of High Volume Vertical and Horizontal Internal Linking
Hello Everyone - I maintain a site with over a million distinct pages of content. Each piece of content can be thought of like a node in graph database or an entity. While there is a bit of natural hierarchy, every single entity can be related to one or more other entities. The conceptual structure of the entities like so: Agency - A top level business unit ( ~100 pages/urls) Office - A lower level business unit, part of an Agency ( ~5,000 pages/urls) Person - Someone who works in one or more Offices ( ~80,000 pages/urls) Project - A thing one or more People is managing ( ~750,000 pages/urls) Vendor - A company that is working on one or more Projects ( ~250,000 pages/urls) Category - A descriptive entity, defining one or more Projects ( ~1,000 pages/urls) Each of these six entities has a unique (url) and content. For each page/url, there are internal links to each of the related entity pages. For example, if a user is looking at a Project page/url, there will be an internal link to one or more Agencies, Offices, People, Vendors, and Categories. Also, a Project will have links to similar Projects. This same theory holds true for all other entities as well. People pages link to their related Agencies, Offices, Projects, Vendors, etc, etc. If you start to do the math, there are tons of internal links leading to pages with tons of internal links leading to pages with tons of internal links. While our users enjoy the ability to navigate this world according to these relationships, I am curious if we should force a more strict hierarchy for SEO purposes. Essentially, does it make sense to "nofollow" all of the horizontal internal links for a given entity page/url? For search engine indexing purposes, we have legit sitemaps that give a simple vertical hierarchy...but I am curious if all of this internal linking should be hidden via nofollow...? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jhariani2 -
Nofollow links & nofollow blog comments - Should I remove
Hello, One of my website has quite a lot (~1000) nofollow blog comment links. Is it worth getting them removed if they are nofollow, could they be dragging the metric of my website down. Does anyone have any experience of this? The site only has about 5 follow links, something seems to be dragging the domain metrics down. Thanks Rob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomfifteen0 -
Why will Google not remove a manual penalty against us?
Our site was placed under a manual penalty last year in June 2012 after penguin rolled out. We were advised by Google that we had unnatural links pointing to our site. We fought for months, running backlink checks and contacting webmasters where Google's WMT was showing the sites which had links. We have submitted numerous reconsideration requests with proof of our efforts in the form of huge well labeled spreadsheets, emails, and screen shots of online forms requesting link removal.When the disavow tool came out we thought it was a godsend and added all the sites who had either ignored us or refused to take down the links to the disavow.txt with the domain: tag. Then we submitted another reconsideration request, but to no avail.We have since had email correspondence with a member of the Google Quality Search Team who after reviewing the evidence of all our previous reconsideration requests and disavow.txt still advised us to make a genuine effort and listed sites which had inorganic links pointing to our site which were already included in the disavow.txt.Google has stated "In order for your site to have a successful reconsideration request, we will need to see a substantial, good-faith effort to remove the links, and this effort should result in a significant decrease in the number of bad links that we see."We have truly done everything we can and proven it too! Especially with all the sites in the disavow.txt there must be a decrease in links pointing to our site. What more can we do? Please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Benbug0 -
How to remove non-requested, non-desired backlinks
Dear Mosers, Before Penguin update we start a link back profile study about who and why are linking and we found hundred of garbage sites like these: http://rakeback-blogger.com/links/ http://personalinjuryattorney-fl.org/get-a-fl-personal-injury-attorney-instead-of-crying-over-spilt-milk and hundred more... They don't have contact form or email address, so what is the best way to remove our link from there (there are any quick way), these sites are damaging our rank. Thank you for your help Claudio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharewarePros0 -
Pagination & SEO
I have the WP-Pagination plugin and I am wondering how to handle duplicate content issues and what's best for SEO. My developer initially downloaded the plugin to speed up loading for the home page. Now my home page has 21 pages of paginated content. But the pagination continues with each of my categories as well. Should I be placing a canonical reference to my home page, or category main page? My site name is gracessweetlife (dot) com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gracessweetlife0