A few questions regarding Moz tools + E-commerce strategy

[osn]

Hi everyone

I'm currently in the midst of optimizing a Scandinavian E-commerce site. I have a few questions, that hopefully someone will be able to help me get answered.

Firstly, GoogleBots should be able to recognize "ø" as "oe", "æ" as "ae" and "å" as "aa" in the URL title. I've noticed that Moz' On-page grader does not support this unfortunately - has something changed or do Scandinavians just receive a little less love than the English?

Secondly, how does one avoid keyword stuffing on E-commerce sites? The products that are displayed in category pages all make use of the same keyword that is targeted for that category. As such, some pages have 40+ mentions of the keyword, although in reality there are less than 15 (the rest being in the product names). Any tips or tricks on how to get this optimized or does Google simply recognize the site as an E-commerce site and somewhat ignores keyword stuffing - as long as the website has sufficient content?

Thirdly, has something happened to Moz' Open Site Explorer? It seems like something has changed and when I checked for backlinks for the site today, only 3 was found. I know for a fact that many many more exist (which other tools also confirm when they scrape the site).

Looking forward to hearing from all of you!

Best,

Mark

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Mark,

I can't really comment on the Moz tools questions, though I suspect it simply has limited functionality for sites that aren't in English.

With regards to your keyword stuffing concerns for an ecommerce website, as with most things in this industry just do what makes sense for the user and (most of) the rest will take care of itself.

In this particular scenario what that means is if your current setup has an awkward number of keywords on it then you should revise, otherwise leave it as-is. For example, if you sell menswear and that word appears in the title of every product you sell that could be a problem.

[JordanRailsback]

Hey Mark!

I'm afraid our tools do have limitations with recognizing non-latin character sets. It's definitely something we'd love to accommodate better, but at the moment, we simply don't have the ability to fully support the majestic tongues of Scandanavia. Apologies for the shortcoming!

As for our link index goes, we generally try to aim for reporting the most prominent and authoritative backlinks for your site, rather than acting as a complete backlink profile. It's a possibility that we haven't heavily-indexed the sites that are currently linking to you, or that the pages linking back to your site are buried deeper within the structure of the linking site, but it's a little tough for me to speak to specific details for a certain site. If you'd like, you can certainly send some examples over to us at help@moz.com for us to take a bit of a deeper look.

Happy weekend!

[BlueCorona]

Hi Mark!

In regards to your question about keyword stuffing, I agree with Chris. Stick with what other leaders in the industry are doing. Google should also be able to see that this is a particular product name, and should be able to differentiate that you are describing a name vs. stuffing keywords within the content with the intention of trying to rank.

All I can really say is to use your best judgement. Track, test, tweak, repeat until you get into a rhythm that seems to work best! Hope this helps.

[Vijay-Gaur]

Hi Mark,

It seems MOZ tools don't support ono-latin characters, you would face same problem with most of the SEO Tools.

As for whether URL structure is right (with non-latin words), you should read on following links

https://moz.com/community/q/non-latin-keywords-urls
https://www.fusionbox.com/blog/detail/are-foreign-language-characters-in-urls-bad-for-seo/536/
https://wpml.org/forums/topic/seos-and-non-latin-urls/
http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/92163/seo-impact-of-using-non-latin-characters-in-url
http://searchengineland.com/should-you-transliterate-your-brand-for-international-seo-130966

Please have a look at the following link to guide you through the process of multi-lingual website SEO as well

http://searchengineland.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-multilingual-and-multiregional-seo-157838

I hope this helps, please respond if you have further questions, I will be happy to answer.

Regards,

Vijay