Product Page Links

[graeme72]

I have a product category page at https://www.hurtlegear.com.au/s1000rr/ which currently has 38 products on it.

Problem is, all the product titles start with the name of the text: "bmw s1000rr" (because that's what they are) - so that means there are 38 anchored internal links on that page, all starting with the same keyword. You can see how that might look to the Google crawler.

Recently that page dropped from around 15 to outside the top 100, and Moz tells me that the page is keyword stuffed with "bmw s1000rr" (no suprise) so I'm guessing that may be the reason the page has disappeared out of the SERPs.

I don't really want to change all the product titles (then they wouldn't make sense) so I'm just wondering if there is any way around this? Is there some way of telling Google that this is a product category page and therefore to ignore the anchor text in all of those product links? Can/should the links have some kind of markup on them? Or is the page beyond help?

Basically I'm looking at a way of keeping the product titles as they are, but avoiding a page penalty from Google somehow.

I'm a bit of a newbie, any suggestions would be most appreciated.

Cheers, Graeme

[dohertyjf]

Hey Graeme -

Good questions here. I think there is something else going on with your page than over-optimization, though you could definitely remove some mentions of your keyword in that top chunk of text. Any idea if some of your competitors have done anything to move up?

I checked your page's cache and it hasn't been re-cached since November 20th, which surprises me. I checked your robots.txt and there's nothing there that causes alarm. Have you made any other changes to your page?

A few things I'd also think about on this page and your site:

• Bulk up pages like https://www.hurtlegear.com.au/bmw/ as that should be able to rank for some head keywords
• On this /s1000rr/ page, remove the links from the images and rely on the anchor text link. Reducing unnecessary internal links like this has been shown to help rankings
• You could expose these model pages in your HTML sitemap. They're currently 3-4 clicks from the homepage, and bringing them up in your hierarchy could help get them crawled more.

Good luck!

[graeme72]

Hi John, thanks for the answer, I really appreciate it, and it's given me some things to work on.

I can't see any changes my competitors have made, and they also haven't moved in the rankings, all that happened was I added a couple of paragraphs of extra text to the top of our page, and then about a week later it dropped out of the top 100. I added that extra text around 10 November, and since then have only made very minor tweaks to try and get it to re-appear.

I'll do as you suggested and in response to your specific points:

• Bulk up pages like https://www.hurtlegear.com.au/bmw/ as that should be able to rank for some head keywords - when you say "bulk up", would you consider it bulked up in it's current form? Or do you mean even more text than that?
• On this /s1000rr/ page, remove the links from the images and rely on the anchor text link. Reducing unnecessary internal links like this has been shown to help rankings - will do, thanks
• You could expose these model pages in your HTML sitemap. They're currently 3-4 clicks from the homepage, and bringing them up in your hierarchy could help get them crawled more - will do, thanks.

Cheers, Graeme

EDIT: Just after I posted this I've noticed we've reappeared at number 19. Will still implement those changes though, they sound sensible to me.