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IMHO, Google has essentially tied our sites together, looking at the rankings and other metrics. We've upgraded some product pages with the same result - the upgraded page and the old page on the other side are stuck on page 2. They even mirror each other in the SERPs. They both move up and down by similar numbers. If Page A drops 2 slots, page B drops 2 slots. It's like the pages are attached at the hip...
This discussion is strictly theoretical... I won't hold anyone to their answer.
If I have 2 websites that are identical in every way and let's say the domain authority for both is 40, and I 301 redirect one site to the other, what would the DA become?
Same question for single pages, both with a PA of 40. If I 301 redirect one page to the other, what does the PA become for the remaining page?
It's a big site, and the most important category page. It explains a lot.
We are a large catalog company with thousands of products across 2 different domains. Google clearly knows that the sites are connected. Both domains are fairly well known brands - thousands of branded searches for each site per month. Roughly half of our products overlap - they appear on both sites. We have a known duplicate content issue - both sites having exactly the same product descriptions, and we are working on it.
We've seen that when a product has different content on the 2 sites, frequently, both pages get to page 2 of the SERPs, but that's as far as it goes, despite aggressive white hat link building tactics.
1. Is it possible to get the same product pages on page 1 of the SERPs for both sites? (I think I know the answer...)
2. Should we be canonicalizing (is that a word?) products across the sites? This would get tricky - both sites have roughly the same domain authority, but in different niches. Certain products and keywords naturally rank better on 1 site or the other depending on the niche.
We are running an A/B split test (Started on 12/12), and a few days after we started the test, we fell from position 9/10 (about 3 weeks on page 1) to position 11/13, and we've been there ever since.
We are still running the test. We disallowed the test page in robots.txt, but that's all.
Theoretically, Google could crawl the site, and find the page, but then the page is disallowed. The alternate page is not indexed.
Could this explain the rankings drop?
Wow. I did some research. I stand corrected. Thanks, Linda.
As far as your categories go, you could have:
www.Domain.com/computers/notebooks/apple-notebooks/
and
www.domain.com/apple-products/
On your category pages, I'd suggest adding unique content at the bottom of the category pages. A paragraph above the fold would help for ranking purposes, but may detract from usability and conversions.
It's been a while since I've used WP, but if you use posts (or posts and pages), you will have a major silo and duplicate content problem with blog category pages.
The way to solve this is to go to the section where you set up your post categories, and set the slug to be identical to your category page. For example, if you have a page category with the slug "blue-widgets", set the post category slug to "blue widgets". This makes the category page the parent for posts in that category.
There are also some adjustments that you will need to make to your URLs removing "/category/ from your URLs. I've done it, and it's pretty easy. Maybe another poster could give you the specifics.
This is a difficult question. I would agree with patrick_g that canonicals are one way to handle duplicate content, but canonicals don't pass link juice to the parent, unless it's through a link.
The canonical tag only tells google which page to index. It does not transfer link juice as does a 301 redirect. Read up on this.
Here are some good choices:
1. if the brands are only for use experience purposes, you could make the pages noindex, follow. This would eliminate the duplicate content issue, and the brands could serve as a link juice hub. They would be kept out of google's index, but would still pass link juice.
2. Create unique content for the brand pages, and give them a title tag and content that differs from the competing page. For example if you already have an "Apple" page, make the new page "Certified Apple Products" (or some other KW).
3. This one requires some programming skill, and is a little controversial. Put the new pages in a parent folder "/hide/" (don't actually use the word "hide"). Put all the new pages in that folder, and disallow the parent folder in robots.txt. Any links on your site to these pages would pass link juice to these pages, which would be lost, and could be a significant link juice drain. Here's the controversial part - put the links to those pages in an iframe, and disallow the iframe folder in robots.txt. This would prevent bots from crawling those links and passing link juice.
Google needs to crawl the bad pages that you 301d. If there are no live links to those pages, then Google can't find them to 301. In short, if you created new lower case URLs, you just increased your duplicate content problem.
To solve this problem, build an HTML sitemap with all of the bad URLs. Have Google fetch and submit the page and all of the pages it links to. Google will crawl all of your old pages and apply the 301s.
If you check Google Analytics, GA is probably seeing it too. We had a similar problem. Canonicalization will help with duplicate content, but it won't help with rankings. Internally, you are sending link juice to multiple versions of the same page. In addition, you could have backlinks pointing at multiple duplicate pages, and splitting the link love.
Canonicalization does not transfer link juice the way a 301 Redirect does. All the canonical tag does is tell Google "Rank This Page". If you don't care about rankings the canonical is fine. If you do care, you need to 301 all of your pages to the lower case version.
If you decide to 301, first, build an HTML sitemap with all of the uppercase URLs. After you do the 301, have Google fetch the sitemap and submit it, This will help Googlebot wind all of the pages that were 301ed.
Silos will always work. It's not some trick - it's how Google works. Here's a very simplified explanation as to why...
Let's say that I have an eCommerce site, and I sell lawnmowers and Plywood. Let's also say that the Lawnmowers category page has a theoretical 100 points of link juice. Lets also say that the site sells 2 lawnmowers - the Fubar 2000 and the Toecutter 300. If the lawnmower category page only links to the Fubar 2000 and the Toecutter 300 pages, the category page will push 45 points of link juice to each page (pages can pass on +/-90% of their link juice, and 90/2=45).
Both pages will receive almost the full 45 point benefit because the pages are relevant to the category page.
If the Lawnmower category page instead only has 1 link to the Plywood page, the Lawnmower category page would push 90 points of link juice to the plywood page. But, the Plywood page would not receive the full benefit of the 90 points, because Lawnmowers and Plywood don't share much relevance. In this case, Google would heavily discount the 90 points, so that the Plywood page might only get the benefit of 30 points. Think of it as a leaky hose.
What happens to the other 60 Points of Link Juice? It gets dumped on the floor, and the site loses the ranking power of those 60 points.
Keep in mind that this is all theoretical, and that link juice comes in different flavors like apple, orange and prune, representing the different ranking factors (Trust, Authority, Topical Authority, Social Signals, etc.) . Orange might discount 90% while prune might only discount 10%. In this case, is there really a 67% link juice hit? Damned if I know, but I had to pick a number... This is all theoretical. I do know that link juice loss between pages that aren't relevant is dramatic. I also know that it is very possible to determine how your internal pages rank based on your internal link structure, and link placement on the page.
By siloing a website, I have seen rankings jump dramatically. Most websites hemorrhage link juice. Think of it as Link Juice Reclamation. The tighter you can build your silos, the less link juice gets dumped on the floor. By reclaiming the spilled link juice and putting it in the right places, you can dramatically increase your rankings. BTW, inbound links work in a similar fashion. If the Lawnmower page was an external site and linked to the Plywood page, the same discounts would apply. That's why it pays to get niche relevant backlinks for maximum benefit.
This in no way accounts for usability, and linking between silos can make sense to benefit end-users. Again, this model is probably overly simplified, and doesn't take into account Block Level Analysis, but the logic is sound. You can build spreadsheet models for link juice distribution factoring in Block level, discounts, etc. It's by no means accurate, but can give you a pretty good idea of where your link juice is going. You can model this on the old (and increasingly irrelevant) PageRank Algorithm. Pagerank is Logarithmic and it takes 8-9x as much link juice to move up in PR. If it takes 100 points of Link Juice to become a PR1, it takes 800-900 points to become a PR 2. Generally speaking a PR2 page, via links, can create roughly 7 to 75 PR1 pages, depending on how close the PR2 is to becoming a PR3.
Canonicals still drain link juice. Canonicals aren't like a 301. The link juice still stays on the canocalized page. All a canonical does is tell Google, in the case of duplicate content, which page is primary. Canonicals handle the duplicate content issue, they do not handle the link juice issue. If I have 2 pages: /product-name/ and /product-name=?khdfpohfo/ that are duplicates, you can via canonical, tell Google to ignore the page with the variable string and rank the page without the variable string. If the page with the variable string has links, the link juice stays on the page.
The HTML Sitemap is there to tell Google about the 301s. the sitemap would look like this:
After you do the 301 redirect, as well as set up parameters in the .htaccess file (I think - not the developer on this), everything should redirect to the lower case URL. The problem is that if you do a 301 redirect for your entire site, Google may not figure it out too quickly. When it crawls your home page downward, it's only going to see the new URLs, and can't crawl the old 301 URLs because there aren't any internal links pointing at them. The only way Google will see the 301 is via an external backlink. The way we solved this was to create an HTML sitemap of all of the old upper case URLs. We then had Google fetch and index/crawl the sitemap. As it crawls the sitemap, where all of the URLs are 301 redirects, it will likewise point all of the Link Juice at the new URLs.
Sheena is spot on. Google has over 200 ranking factors. A tool that I like is Majestic SEO and it's trust flow metric. Quite often, when I can't figure our why a site is outranking us, they have a higher TF than we do. I rely on Moz's DA/PA and Majestic's CF/TF, and they are usually pretty accurate when used together.
Here's one other factor - DA/PA/CF/TF needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Majestic and Moz have their own Bots, and don't crawl and index nearly as thoroughly as Google does, and they also crawl more slowly. I've seen some studies that show that Majestic and Moz only pick up 1/3 of your actual backlinks. If your competitor has some awesome links that were missed by Moz and Majestic missed, this could also be the answer.
We had the same issue. Boy, was it an education. I had no idea that URLs were case sensitive for Google, and neither did my SEO buddies. I bet if you asked 100 SEOs if URLs were case sensitive for Google, 95 would answer "No". We discovered the problem in GWT and GA when they had different statistics for the mixed case and all lower case versions of the URL. We believed that we had both a duplicate content issue as well as a link juice splitting issue, with backlinks being pointed at both URLs.
We solved the problem by doing a 301 redirect, but as we are an ecommerce site with thousands of products, it was a messy process. We had to redirect pretty much every page on the site since the mixed case categories contaminated subcategories and products.
The 301 went pretty smoothly, and we saw a minor bump up in some of our Rankings. I would strongly suggest that you create an HTML sitemap for every upper case URL that you are going to 301. Here were our thoughts - we could be wrong on this. If we just 301 a page, and don't tell Google, then Google won't know about it unless it tries to crawl the page. We felt like we needed to show Google that all of the pages are being redirected asap. Create an HTML sitemap with all of your upper case URLs. After you do the 301, have Google fetch and index the sitemap page and all of the pages that it links to. Leave the map up for a few days, and then you can take it down. This will expedite moving the link juice to the correct pages as Google will index the 301 for every page in the sitemap.
We are doing a major overhaul on our site, and we have some questions about URLs, breadcrumbs and ecommerce.
Currently, a product can reside in multiple categories, and can have multiple URLs based on how a user navigates to the page. We handle this via canonicals, but it's awful for SEO on many levels. O-U-C-H.
The main issue is that a product can reside in multiple categories.
At this point, Plan A for our overhaul is that a product URL is always going to be www.domain.com/product-name-sku.html/. Neat and clean, and avoids end-user confusion if they navigate to the product through a category that doesn't match the URL.
Plan B: We can anchor a product to a category or subcategory, (www.domain.com/category-name/subcategory-name/product-name-sku.html) but we think that this cuts down on usability as users can navigate to a product through different categories, and the URL may not match the user's navigation.
Based on how Google has devalued URLs for ranking purposes, I don't think that there is much of an SEO advantage to Plan B. Am I wrong?
A product can show up in multiple categories - for example:
www.domain.com/womens-clothing/
www.domain.com/womens-clothing/dresses/
www,domain.com/womens-clothing/dresses/maxidresses/
Category breadcrumbs take care of themselves. What is the best practice to handle the breadcrumb on the product page considering that there are multiple paths a user can take to a product? Options:
1. The breadcrumb on the product page dynamically changes based on how the user navigates to the page. The URL is always fixed as per above, but we change the breadcrumb based on the session.
ex: Product: Black Ruffled MuuMuu
Home > Womens Clothing > Black Ruffled MuuMuu
Home > Womens Clothing > Dresses > Black Ruffled MuuMuu
We would be showing Google different breadcrumbs based on how the bot navigates to the page. Are there any issues with this from an SEO perspective as it would seem to provide the better user experience?
2. The breadcrumb on a product page is always fixed. We anchor a product to a category or subcategory and the breadcrumb is always the same no matter how a user navigates to the product. This is simpler from a development perspective, and we are always showing the same breadcrumb to Google. IMHO, this is not as good for usability.
ex: Breadcrumb is always: Home > Womens Clothing > Dresses > Black Ruffled MuuMuu regardless of how a user navigates to it.
Which way would our ecommerce experts recommend?
Just started SEO on some legacy sites running JS navigation. Are there any proven ways to stop Google from parsing links and passing internal linkjuice? Ex: iframes, Ajax, JS, etc. Google is parsing some JS links on a couple of our legacy sites. The problem is that some pages are getting link juice and others aren't. It's also unpredictable which links are parsed and which aren't. The choice is rebuild the navigation (ouch), or figure out a way to block JS links entirely and build a simple text based secondary nav for link juice distribution. I definitely don't want to use nofollow.
Any thoughts?