Posted by Everett Sizemore
Mozzers just can't get enough of e-commerce.
On July 31st, Everett did a webinar for us about tips and tricks for making your e-commerce sites SEO-friendly. As attendees had a ton of questions -- not all of which we could answer in our limited time together, we wanted to make sure they all were answered.
Because Everett's super generous with his time and knowledge, he went through the many questions left unanswered. While we suggest checking out Everett's webinar, anyone running an e-commerce shop can definitely find some great tips and advice in his answers. Time to start loving those product pages like never before! This post is a follow-up to answer some questions attendees had during the recent e-commerce webinar.
Q: In terms of bounce rate, what do you do if a product is temporarily out of stock?
A: This is a great question because it ties into what to do with out of stock products. My recommendation is to keep the page up and serve the 200 status code with an “out of stock” message instead of removing the page. However, if the product is being discontinued, then you want to redirect that page to the parent category. Given that user-experience is so important (especially when it comes to keeping visitors from clicking back to the SERPs), you should do more than just show an “out of stock” message. Some ideas include:
- An alert signup form that sends an email when the product comes back in stock.
- An estimated date when the product will be back in stock, and the ability to back-order it.
- Show related products (e.g. This is out of stock, but you may also want to check out these other items).
Q: We are planning on migrating from a Zen Cart site to a Magento Cart. Are there any other tips you have before developing a new site?
A: Develop a plan on what you’re going to do about the layered navigation. A work-around I linked to in the slides is Amasty’s “Improved Navigation for Magento” which you can learn more about here.
You can also use the SEO Suite Ultimate Magento Extension or the SEO Suite Pro Magento Extension extensions to handle rel canonical tags and robots meta tags, which aren’t currently default features for Magento. I also recommend looking into this extension as a workaround for tracking multiple steps in a single-page checkout process.
There are a ton of general e-commerce tips included in the webinar, like content on category pages, that would apply to a new site.
Q: Everything Google does is designed to keep people on Google and clicking more of their ads. Do you have any proof of pogosticking and rankings, other than the ability to block a site in google if you bounce back to Google quickly? Why should we get penalized for referring traffic back to them?
A: No, I do not have any proof that someone clicking to your site and then clicking the back button without viewing any other pages is bad for rankings. It would be great if someone has some empirical data on this, but it is an obvious signal that they didn’t like what they found there, so I feel confident in advising my clients to keep that to a minimum. I might rephrase that as: “Everything Google does is designed to get the searcher to their desired goal with as few steps as possible.” Referring someone back to them so they can then click on the next result down from you adds two extra steps, which is why Google may not think that is a desired outcome.
Q: Can you clarify whether or not category names should be in the URL?
A: I think categories should be in a category folder and products should be in a product folder, but you shouldn’t include categories in the product URL. In other words, the set up might look something like this:
http://www.domain.com/category/widgets/ (top level category)
http://www.domain.com/category/widgets/blue-widgets/ (sub category)
http://www.domain.com/product/super-blue-widget/ (product page)
If you are to put a category in the product URL, you often end up with multiple non-canonical URLs for every product, such as:
http://www.domain.com/widgets/super-blue-widget/
http://www.domain.com/widgets/blue-widgets/super-blue-widget/
http://www.domain.com/widgets/super-widgets/super-blue-widget/
In this case, all three of the above URLs would go to the same product page.
Some people prefer a totally flat architecture in which everything is off of the root, but I don’t think that is logical. For one thing, it precludes you from doing some useful diagnostic searches on Google, such as (site:domain.com inurl:product) to find out how many product pages are indexed. Others feel that having the category keywords in the product URL gives them an advantage. Perhaps there is a slight advantage in terms of keywords in the URL, but I feel that is eclipsed by the disadvantages, including those above and the fact that you would be making product pages several more directories deep in the architecture.
Q: How do e-commerce sites optimize for countries? (For example: a Canadian company selling a product to Canadian visitors, when American sites still outrank them.)
If your business is located in Canada, the site is hosted in Canada. you are using a .ca TLD, your customers are located in Canada, and the spelling is Canadian – you should have a big advantage over U.S. sites for searches from within Canada whether on Google.com or Google.ca if all other factors are equal. The problem is that other factors are never equal. If you have all of the above based covered and are still being outranked by U.S. sites, it may come down to their having a better site, better links, more brand recognition and authority in the space, better on-page optimization, and so on.
In terms of having a site that sells to customers in multiple countries, especially if you are using the same content but change certain things like prices, shipping info, and possibly some spellings, you should look into the “rel="alternate" hreflang="x” tag in combination with geographically targeted pages, as discussed here.
Q: Is it wrong to use the format http://www.site.com/category-x/product-x/ rather than just using http://www.site.com/product-x/?
Yes and no. I do not recommend putting categories in product URLs for reasons discussed above, but I also recommend putting products inside a product folder, though I am much less adamant about that than I am about the issue of categories in the product URL.
Q: What is your recommendation of shopping carts? Do you have any preference like Magento, bigCommerce, or Volusion?
I don’t know a lot about bigCommerce specifically, but I would recommend Volusion if you’re OK with being on a Microsoft-IIS server (which many SEOs are not because they are more comfortable working in a Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) environment). Magento is also a great platform once you implement the fixes discussed in an earlier answer above.
It really is tough to recommend one e-commerce product over another. They all have their pros and cons, some of which are going to be more or less important to different people. To some, a Software as a Service (SAS) arrangement is great because they don’t have developers of their own and need the support. For others, it is just tying their hands when they want to customize their store. For some, cost is the major factor, while others might see features or flexibility as the most important things to consider.
Q: I have reviews on my product pages, but these reviews are also contained in a separate location on the site. What would be the best way to handles these?
Great question! On one hand, you want that unique, useful content on your product pages, especially on a site with manufacturer supplied content. On the other hand, product review pages are a great way to get long-tail traffic from earlier on in the buying cycle. Depending on how much control you have over the review system, you could approach this in several different ways.
Preferably you would look to Amazon.com as an example of how to handle this. Put the first few comments on the product page and, once they reach the max (say, 3 to 10) they would start moving over to the reviews page, which could be in a reviews folder or on a sub-domain. You could decide which reviews show up on the product page by those that are found most useful by other visitors if you have that kind of engagement. Otherwise, you could base it on the most recent, or a variety of star ratings, or some other factor. I wouldn’t just show the highest rated ones because shoppers may be turned off if they see what you’re doing.
I wouldn’t show the reviews that are on the product page on the review page as well. The link on the product page should say “see more reviews” rather than “see all reviews” for that reason.
You may not be able to do the “best” thing for all sorts of reasons. I had to robots.txt block the reviews.domain.com subdomain on a site once because there was no way to keep that content from not duplicating what was on the product pages, and I couldn’t even put a robots follow,noindex meta tag on them. We left a good chunk of reviews on the product page and still allowed visitors to access the “see all reviews” page even though it wasn’t indexed. That situation worked out really well.
Q: Could you go over the point you make about creating absolute links versus dynamic links? How do you not make absolute links?
There is a scalability problem of “hard coding” links to product pages from other pages on the site, such as from other product descriptions. For a few of your “main” products that aren’t getting discontinued any time soon it can be manageable and helpful. But if you make a habit of hard coding links like that and then a year later lots of those products start getting discontinued, you’re now in the business of monitoring 404 reports or spidering your site to find and fix broken links all the time. By doing your product interlinking dynamically, as in “automatically” like with a Related Products area, you can typically avoid the time-consuming hassle of removing links because those products will no longer show as “related” or “popular” if they are taken off the site. If you only have a couple dozen or fewer products in the first place, you can pretty much ignore this advice.
Q: What is your recommendation for surplus paginated pages that once contained products, but for whatever reason there are fewer products now?
My recommendation is to let them 404. So, if you had 66 pages of pagination on Tuesday and then some products were taken off the site and now you only have 65 paginated pages then …/?page=66 would return a 404. The example site I used for this was showing the same content on page 66, 67, 68… as it showed on page 65. Other common issues with this type of thing is a “soft 404” page that doesn’t show anything, or has an error message for the user, but gives a 200 status code in the http header response, which tells search engines that the page is still there.
However, someone contacted me after the webinar and said he handles these with a 302 (temporary redirect) to the last existing page in the set. So in the example above page 66 would 302 redirect to page 65 until more products were added. I think this is a fantastic solution, but my only concern would be if page 66 never came back. That’s ok with one or two pages, but if you’re talking thousands of them across the entire site you may be better off just having them removed from the index.
Q: Do you recommend linking to products from the homepage, or just linking to the category?
Your category links will probably be contained in the site-wide navigation, though I think links contained within the main body section of the page are given more weight. I would advise linking to some of your top products from the homepage, as well as a few category links if they are more important than others. As you probably know, given the nature of your question, the homepage is usually your strongest page and has the most page-rank / authority to pass on to other page. Thus you should link to whichever pages on your site to which you want to pass on the most page-rank. I don’t believe in any “rule” that says you can only put this many or that many links on a page, but I do try to remember that every new link you add reduces the amount of page-rank that can be passed on through the other links.
Q: Regarding "not provided": does that mean you think there is enough randomness in the data that we know to conclude that the same conditions exist in the data that we don't know?
The data you have the ability to see can tell you some things about the data you can’t see. The more data you have, the more you can trust it to tell you something about the data you can’t see because the greater the sample size the more reliable your deductions are likely to be.
For more on this read, I recommend reading AJ Kohn’s post on Blind Five Year Old.
Q: If we have a small amount of products, would it be okay to flatten completely?
Yes. It is “ok” for anyone, but preferable for diagnostic reasons (or if you want to easily segment XML sitemaps, etc…) to have products in a /products/ folder. However, if we’re talking fewer than a dozen or two products, I see no reason why you couldn’t just have them off the root.
Q: Would it be harmful to put the content below the products in the category page as long as it's still useful for the user in order to not push the products below the fold?
I won’t say it would be “harmful” but I don’t see how it could be really “useful” to the user way down there either. I do understand your concern, however, and want to stress that I don’t recommend putting much content on category pages. We’re talking a sentence or two, not a big paragraph. Going back to your question though, I haven’t see any evidence of the “below the fold algorithm” affecting content on e-commerce sites. It seems more to be aimed at advertising that pushes all of the content below the fold.
Q: Should I use a 404 redirect, or just send the 404's to the homepage in Magento?
I don’t like to redirect users to a 404 page. I like to show the 404 response code and message on the URL they were trying to access. Redirecting them to the home page is especially troublesome because 1) it is a poor user experience that could confuse a lot of people, and 2) you lose the ability to capture 404 data that will help you fix broken links and salvaged page-rank from external links that might be going to pages that no longer exist. When you have a page that no longer exists that 301 redirects to a page that exists, which returns a 200 status code that is still a form of a “soft 404.”
Q: I have a buyer's guide page (with great content) ranking much better than a product category page for the keyword of our product category. We want our product category to show first. What can we do to make this happen?
Having some content on your category page should help. Even two short lines of text will go a long way to improve category page rankings. However, it still might not be enough to outrank a content-rich buyer’s guide if they are both targeting the same keywords. Then you might run into the issue that someone reading a buyer’s guide and someone shopping on a category page are at two different points in the buying cycle and probably wouldn’t be typing the same keywords anyway.
Let’s look at it this way: Google wants to return results that put the fewest amount of clicks between the searcher and their goal. A category page is by definition an intermediate step. Google would MUCH rather just send them straight to the product page. However, if the user isn’t performing a query with the clear intent that they want to see a specific product (e.g. best lawn mowers, lawn mower store, buy lawn mowers, zero-turn mowers, heavy-duty weed wackers…) then a buying guide or category page IS the destination most suitable to the query. In this case, “best lawn mowers” would probably be a great query/intent match for a buyer’s guide, but the others would be good matches for a category page.
Q: What number of products are manageable for a view all page? 100? 200? What do you suggest for steps to plan, test, and then implement a view all?
I don’t know the answer to this question, though I suspect that more than 100 is pushing it. I think it might depend a little on what your users prefer (every site will have different users who like to shop in different ways) and how fast the page loads. Test the load time of your View All pages (all categories, as some have more products than others) and make sure they are relatively fast compared to the average site. Google provides that info here. Of course, post-implementation, pay attention to rankings and conversion rates.
As I mentioned in the presentation, I haven’t had much luck with View All Canonical, though I’ve heard other shave. I prefer just using rel next/prev.
Q: Are press releases a good option for building backlinks to my product pages?
It depends on how you distribute them and whether your products are worth press coverage. If you are asking if distributing a press release on PRNewsWire, PRWeb, or some other distribution service saying that you have a new product, then the answer is probably not.
If you want to learn how to do PR the right way check out this post from Chris Winfield.
Q: Can you 301 redirect page 67 to page 66, if page 66 is the last page in the paginated content?
Great question! I would rather 302 that since it would probably be a temporary redirect.
Q: What would you consider to be too many categories? 2? 3?
I don’t have any rule or opinion about how many categories is too many. It all depends on the nature of your business. A site that sells everything like Amazon is going to have a lot of categories. A site that sells only bedroom furniture probably wouldn’t have more than five or six top level categories.
If you are referring to how many levels deep the taxonomy should go, I’d try to keep it at two or three subcategories and rely on filtering or facets to further whittle down the results.
Q: The inclusion of something like /products/ in the URLs allows you to easily isolate product pages in Analytics, which is great for product-specific performance tracking. Is it not worth using a single generic category for product pages?
I think we’re on the same page here, but we might be using different terminology. I wouldn’t call the /products/ directory a “category” but I agree that having it allows you to more easily isolate product pages for many different purposes.
Q: In your Volusion example, I noticed the URL had abc124.htm which seemed to be a product id as opposed to name. Do you like product ID in URL's or does that pollute the URL?
I would prefer just to have the product name in the URL, but if you do put the product ID in there it would be good to separate it from the name by a dash (e.g. productname-1234 instead of productname1234).
Q: How big of a problem is it if you have similar content on your product pages but the content is unique to your site (different variations of your own custom product)?
The more unique you can make that content, the better. If it is just color or size variations, I would use product variant selectors instead of a totally new product page. If they are different enough to require their own page and SKU, then you will just have to be creative in your copywriting. Sometimes it helps to have multiple copywriters work on it since one person could end up being repetitive after awhile if they are writing about similar products.
But to answer your question, I think it is a significant problem if you have a lot of content that seems very similar, even if it is unique to your site.
Q: How do you feel about redirecting (301) expired products?
I feel like that is a good idea. The only problem is when huge enterprise level e-commerce sites have thousands of products expiring every quarter and the volume of redirects gets into the hundreds of thousands, which could potentially cause some site performance issues in terms of load time. In that case, I would rather let the ones without external links just 404 since you wouldn’t be losing any page-rank and wouldn’t be linking to them internally.
Also, I try to avoid redirecting them to other product pages since you’ll end up with multiple redirect hops after awhile when the new product expires. I’d rather send them to the parent category page.
Q: Can the crawlers see contents behind the javascript in the collapsible example provided?
The content isn’t behind javascript in those examples. The content is in the source code on the page. The javascript just controls the page display.
If you put the content in the js file, or or some other file and had the js file or inline javascript call in that content to display then you could have some issues, though Google specifically has gotten pretty good at seeing even that.
Q: Suggestions to increase crawlability for a site with AJAX rendered search results?
I would not rely on search results for crawlability. I would rely on a logical taxonomy and solid architecture using category pages. Google is a search engine and they don’t want to send their users to another set of search results because that is not a good user experience. I know some e-commerce platforms use search pages as categories, but I typically advise their clients to create category/department pages instead.
For a deeper explanation, check out this great post about creating craw-friendly AJAX sites using pushState().
Q: Do you have any tips for generating product page meta data for thousands of products in a way that's more flexible that just plugging in "product name" for the title, description, etc.? I know some platforms use Tags, but that seems a little clunky as well. Have you seen anything work well for this?
It all depends on what information you have available in the database. Get an output of all of the data fields available for products along with maybe 100 – 1,000 examples to start. Then you can just begin mixing and matching like people do with those refrigerator magnets to create something that makes sense and is useful to searchers. I like including prices, manufacturers, model numbers, size, color, etc… But every site is going to be different so I can’t really give a single answer here.
One thing to look out for is the odd description that doesn’t make sense. Your Frankenstein meta description may work for “most” products but if you have a significant number that don’t work well with that automation, perhaps because the fields you chose aren’t applicable to all products, then it could be a problem. Combining things like is/are with singulars and plurals could be an issue too. For example:
Our [PRODUCTNAME] is just [$]! …
Makes sense with: “Our Sony Camcorder is just $19.95!...
But not with: “Our Rewritable DVDs is just $10.99!...
I also like to have lots of variations so they don’t seem repetitive. You wouldn’t use the same format like that on ten-thousand products. When in doubt, the first couple of sentences from the product description is usually a safe bet.
Q: Have you seen any penalties from hiding a large percentage of a page's content with collapsible jQuery functionality? I've been cautious with this and have tried to keep the total amount of content that could be collapsed below a certain threshold percentage.
I haven’t seen any, but I suppose it could happen if you go overboard.
Q: What is the best way to prevent the same product from having multiple categories? Also, would it be beneficial to remove category name from the URL when you click on the product from a specific category? How about choosing one main category for each product?
This is why I suggest not putting categories in product URLs. Only choosing one category per product could work on some sites, but could severely limit you on others and may not be a great user experience or a good way to keep your average order volume high.
Q: With large e-commerce sites, do you find that using xml sitemaps can have a large benefit for SEO? e.g., more pages indexed, more traffic etc
Yes, more pages indexed, especially if there is a deep taxonomy.
Q: Are you saying linking to the same page twice on a page does pass more link juice, or that the second link doesn't get counted?
The second link doesn’t get counted. BUT… I was suggesting a way around this by using a named-anchor link, as discussed here.
Q: How do you deal with different models of the same product (different color ipods for example)?
I’d prefer to deal with these using product variants that are selected on a single product page instead of having separate product pages if possible.
Q: For a site that has over 15,000 products, wouldn't it be better to have some type of granular URL (instead of everything being dumped in one tree, i.e. product/)? Would that allow for segmented site maps and provide a more accurate categorization?
Great question. If you can do this without having more than one URL per product, and still having the freedom to add a product to more than one category, then maybe I would consider it.
Q: I am currently dealing with a client with around 30,000 products and he has an algorithm that uses same description but places the appropriate item keyword where needed. What are your thoughts regarding duplicate content and e commerce products? Do you have any recommendations or do I simply need to create 30,000 unique descriptions?
See the notes on slide 17. One thing you could try is having dozens of different types of descriptions applied randomly to the products so at least you don’t have 30,000 that follow the same pattern. Just make sure that once the pattern is applied to a product it stays that way, rather than being randomly assigned one for each time it is called up from the database.
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