The 3 Most Common SEO Problems on Listings Sites Posted on: Monday 27 April 2015 — 02:16 Posted by Dom-Woodman Listings sites have a very specific set of search problems that you don't run into everywhere else. In the day I'm one of Distilled's analysts, but by night I run a job listings site, teflSearch. So, for my first Moz Blog post I thought I'd cover the three search problems with listings sites that I spent far too long agonising about. Quick clarification time: What is a listings site (i.e. will this post be useful for you)? The classic listings site is Craigslist, but plenty of other sites act like listing sites:
1. Generating quality landing pagesThe landing pages on listings sites are incredibly important. These pages are usually the primary drivers of converting traffic, and they're usually generated automatically (or are occasionally custom category pages) . For example, if I search "Jobs in Manchester", you can see nearly every result is an automatically generated landing page or category page. There are three common ways to generate these pages (occasionally a combination of more than one is used):
Those definitions are still bit general; let's clear them up with some examples: Amazon uses a combination of categories and facets. If you click on browse by department you can see all the category pages. Then on each category page you can see a faceted search. Amazon is so large that it needs both. Indeed generates its landing pages through free text search, for example if we search for "IT jobs in manchester" it will generate: IT jobs in manchester. teflSearch generates landing pages using just facets. The jobs in China landing page is simply a facet of the main search page. Each method has its own search problems when used for generating landing pages, so lets tackle them one by one. AsideFacets and free text search will typically generate pages with parameters e.g. a search for "dogs" would produce: But to make the URL user friendly sites will often alter the URLs to display them as folders These are still just ordinary free text search and facets, the URLs are just user friendly. (They're a lot easier to work with in robots.txt too!) Free search (& category) problemsIf you've decided the base of your search will be a free text search, then we'll have two major goals:
SolutionSearch engines won't use search boxes and so the solution to both problems is to provide links to the valuable landing pages so search engines can find them. There are plenty of ways to do this, but two of the most common are:
Breadcrumbs are also often used in addition to the two above and in both the examples above, you'll find breadcrumbs that reinforce that hierarchy. Category (& facet) problemsCategories, because they tend to be custom pages, don't actually have many search disadvantages. Instead it's the other attributes that make them more or less desirable. You can create them for the purposes you want and so you typically won't have too many problems. However, if you also use a faceted search in each category (like Amazon) to generate additional landing pages, then you'll run into all the problems described in the next section. At first facets seem great, an easy way to generate multiple strong relevant landing pages without doing much at all. The problems appear because people don't put limits on facets. Lets take the job page on teflSearch. We can see it has 18 facets each with many options. Some of these options will generate useful landing pages: The China facet in countries will generate "Jobs in China" that's a useful landing page. On the other hand, the "Conditional Bonus" facet will generate "Jobs with a conditional bonus," and that's not so great. We can also see that the options within a single facet aren't always useful. As of writing, I have a single job available in Serbia. That's not a useful search result, and the poor user engagement combined with the tiny amount of content will be a strong signal to Google that it's thin content. Depending on the scale of your site it's very easy to generate a mass of poor-quality landing pages. Facets generate other problems too. The primary one being they can create a huge amount of duplicate content and pages for search engines to get lost in. This is caused by two things: The first is the sheer number of possibilities they generate, and the second is because selecting facets in different orders creates identical pages with different URLs. We end up with four goals for our facet-generated landing pages:
The first goal needs to be set internally; you're always going to be the best judge of the number of results that need to present on a page in order for it to be useful to a user. I'd argue you can rarely ever go below three, but it depends both on your business and on how much content fluctuates on your site, as the useful landing pages might also change over time. We can solve the next three problems as group. There are several possible solutions depending on what skills and resources you have access to; here are two possible solutions: Category/facet solution 1: Blocking the majority of facets and providing external links
Nofollow all your facet links, and noindex and block category pages which aren't valuable or are deeper than x facet/folder levels into your search using robots.txt. You set x by looking at where your useful facet pages exist that have search volume. So, for example, if you have three facets for televisions: manufacturer, size, and resolution, and even combinations of all three have multiple results and search volume, then you could set you index everything up to three levels. On the other hand, if people are searching for three levels (e.g. "Samsung 42" Full HD TV") but you only have one or two results for three-level facets, then you'd be better off indexing two levels and letting the product pages themselves pick up long-tail traffic for the third level. If you have valuable facet pages that exist deeper than 1 facet or folder into your search, then this creates some duplicate content problems dealt with in the aside "Indexing more than 1 level of facets" below.)
In order re-create the linking, you can add a top level drop down menu to your site containing the most valuable category pages, add category links elsewhere on the page, or create a separate part of the site with links to the valuable category pages. The top level drop down menu you can see on teflSearch (it's the search jobs menu), the other two examples are demonstrated in Photobucket and Indeed respectively in the previous section. The big advantage for this method is how quick it is to implement, it doesn't require any fiddly internal logic and adding an extra menu option is usually minimal effort. Category/facet solution 2: Creating internal logic to work with the facets
There are four parts to the second solution:
As with the last solution, x is set by looking at where your useful facet pages exist that have search volume (full explanation in the first solution), and if you're indexing more than one level you'll need to check out the aside below to see how to deal with the duplicate content it generates. This will generate landing pages for the facets you've decided are valuable and noindex the landing pages which are low-quality. It will only create pages for a single level of facets, which prevents duplicate content. Aside: Indexing more than one level of facetsIf you want a second level of facets to be indexable, e.g. Televisions - Facet 1 (46"), Facet 2 (Samsung), then the easiest option is to remove the fourth rule from above and either add links to them using one of the methods in Solution 1, or add the pages to your sitemap. The alternative is to set robots.txt to allow category pages up to 2 levels to be indexed and all facets to be followed up to two levels. This will, however, create duplicate content, because now search engines will be able to create:
You'll have to either rel canonical your duplicate pages with another rule or set-up your facets so they create a single unique URL. You'll also need to be aware that unless you set-up more complicated logic, all of your followable facets will multiply. Depending on your setup you might need to block more paths in robots.txt or set-up more logic. Letting search engines index more than one level of facets adds a lot of possible problems; make sure you're keeping track of them. 2. User-generated content cannibalization |
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