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See:

http://moz.com/community/q/where-to-outsource-product-pages-contents

it is about 8 posts below this one.

Short version answer:

I like your option #2 and think you are on the right track there.

Long version:

It sounds like you have a lot of category and subcategory pages that are of low quality due to the type of traffic and/or due to the amount of content that is on a given page.   Additionally, if you have product information on these pages and a product could fit into several sub categories, you have a lot of duplicate information on these pages, which adds to the low quality of content issue.  This also increases the number of pages Google has to crawl on your site at any one time and so Google is spending all this extra time crawling pages on your site that do not matter, vs the pages that do.

The pages probably ranked for a bit, but then did not do as well as when Google finally sorted it all out, as Google saw a lot of low quality pages and/or redundant information.

While you do need to sometimes have a lot of URLs in the ecommerce setup to allow users to sort results and find the products they need, you do not (and should not) have to expose all of those URLs to Google and/or try to rank them.

You need to start back at the basics.  Who is your customer and what are they searching for and what keywords are most likely searched to find the products they are looking for.

Do any of your customers care about "soft shoes"?  If they are old, this may be really important, but if they are young it may be that they are looking for "fashionable shoes".

You have to find a way to simplify the content on your site around those ideas.   I would think about writing hub section on "fashionable shoes" "cool shoes" "latest shoes" - something that talks about the latest trends (and oh by the way here is a shoe you sell that goes along with that trend), have a section on that page were you link to your most fashionable shoes (the best sellers) then allow the user to click in and browse more within your catalog.  With your "fashionable shoe" page you have something you can share on FB, that people may want to comment on, and link to, plus that page starts your product listing for that type of shoe and leads them into your full shoe catalog.

In your shoe catalog, I would make sure that you have one main section "shoes for sale" or something else - the main entry into your store/catalog.  Have a paginated way for Google to crawl all of your shoes, but it cannot hit any of your filters to change up any of the urls.  Google can now find all your products, read all the original descriptions and reviews of each product but it will not get lost when a person wants to resort by price or by size or by style etc.

Make sure all of your topic pages and all the paginated pages (but none of the sorting option pages) are in your sitemap as well.

There are variations on the theme I describe above, but if you want to stand out, you have to organize around your user personas and the words they are looking for and the words that bring in buyers.  Don't worry about losing traffic that does not convert, it does not pay the bills.

Good luck!

Generally, the .com URLs are more common and therefore seen as more "normal" to users and more likely to be trusted.

It does not mean that the .training will not work, just that it is different and that may cause other issues outside of ranking. You may remember that when .info came onto the scene, it was used by spammers so much that now it has kind of a black cloud over it.

Of course the trick with the foo-training.com domain is that you have to make sure people put in the dash. Consider issues around what if they leave the dash out, should we overtly mention the dash to remind people (think radio and TV and other ads) etc etc etc.

Overall, remember that you do not have to have "foo training" in the URL to rank well. Yes, it can help, but it really does not give you the power it used to have in the old days due to people using it as a way to spam the search engines to get keyword rich anchor text.

I would lean towards the URL with the dash (if you think it will not confuse folks to have the dash) or see about getting another .com URL and getting your keyword in the slug or in other places. I would defer to other Moz folks to see if they have had much success with the newer TLDs.

You need the 301 redirects.  302 redirects give me ulcers.  Is there any reason you are keeping things in the trash?  If you really need to save something for later, putting it in the trash is probably not your best option.  If you need to permanently delete them - then go ahead.  If you need the trash option for storage, then you probably need another plugin.

Thanks Rich for the insight, it helps in understanding where you are coming from.  My only other point would be that if you do go through with this partnership, there should be some other way to build your brand with all the customers coming through the site you are going to build/maintain.   Your contract should make clear that you are allowed to have access to all customer data and can use it for marketing etc from your main product site (not the one you are managing).  Your partner should not only promote this new site, but your branded products and main site as well.   Leverage this situation to gain awareness of your product so that you can build organic traffic to your site.  Set your business plan so that at the end of the contract you have used this relationship to make your reach "huge".  Therefore, if at the end of the contract your revenue goes to zero from this project it does not matter.  Don't assume that your partner would never start their own e-commerce operation.  Once they watch you guys take the lion's share of the revenue, they can do the math really quick to realize that they can afford to build something, pay for it and make even more money.

There was once this massive web portal that ruled the internet called "Yahoo" way back in the last century.  Yahoo decided to let this little startup that was founded by a couple of goofy college kids to show branded web search results on the Yahoo website. As Yahoo was the biggest site on the internet at the time, lots of people learned about this really great little search engine called "Google" (you may have heard of it).  So many people liked the search results from Google that even after Yahoo stopped using Google for search results, it did not matter as the users were already going to Google directly.

Hello!

If you want to do this. You need to setup your rel alternate and canonical links

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/separate-urls

I am not sure if the https vs http designation is that big of a deal as you are already setting up a separate set of URLs with the www. and the m.

What is interesting here is that with the new mobile first update occurring, I am not sure that this page will eventually be updated to have the canonicals point to the mobile version vs the desktop version as mentioned in the link above. Likewise, the https is favored for ranking so there may be another reason to canonical that direction, but you would need to test and see. You may find that due to the mobile first initiative and Googles preference for https that your m. pages might do better.

Generally, I would find a way to move away from the m. setup and simply run a responsive site on https://www - that is going to get you the best bang for your buck.

Then a 302 would be more appropriate as it is a temporary redirect.   It sounds like you need to work on some of your publishing operations/procedures.   Ideally, once you publish a post, it stays up etc.  You need to figure out how you can improve the process so that you minimize getting into the situation to start with.

If you need to, I would delay the posting to start with if that would ensure that once it posts, it stays up on the site etc.

Good luck.

Great response, Thomas!

You need to figure out what is going on with u.couponshop.co.uk as there are about 108 pages listed that get mixed up when you search

site:couponshop.co.uk/

If you go to page 9 you then get your https://www.couponshop.com results. What is interesting is out of the 13,000 pages listed the u.couponshop URLs are listed before the www ones.  This is an issue.

Those old URLs need to be redirected to the proper URLs on the current site if those URL get traffic or have links to them.

site:u.couponshop.co.uk/

Can be used to find the u.couponshop pages.  You will need to look in your server logs to see how often Google is crawling them. You may find that Google is crawling them a fair amount and so you need to get them taken care of. You also want to see if there are any sites linking to these URLs as well to determine if they are of value to you.

Somewhere on your server you are serving up pages with redirects and Google is crawling them and cataloging them and may not be paying as much attention to your new website.

You also need to find a way to stop this from happening.  Ounce of prevention!

I am seeing a double hop on the example 301

http://startupfashion.com/product/fashion-brand-line-sheet-template > 301 redirects to > http://startupfashion.com/shop/product/wholesale-line-sheet-template > 301 redirects to > http://startupfashion.com/shop/product/fashion-line-sheet-template > and the final page sends a 200.

I made some assumptions on your original URL structure (took out /shop/)  looked around and found something similar on

http://startupfashion.com/product/fashion-designers-guide-creating-websites-sell >301> http://startupfashion.com/shop/product/fashion-designers-guide-creating-websites-sell/ >301> http://startupfashion.com/shop/product/fashion-designers-guide-creating-websites-sell > shows 200

The second instance is redirecting a slashed to a non-slashed version.

Your "category" URL has a typo in it

http://startupfashion.com/shop/catgory/fashion-business-guides-and-ebooks

I checked your sitemap

http://startupfashion.com/product-sitemap.xml

Does not have any links to the new product pages.  They all reference the old.

You also have a category sitemap with different URLs than your new catgory URL

http://startupfashion.com/category-sitemap.xml

Just on my quick 10 min look, I think you need to

1. Double check your 301 redirects

2. Make sure there are no "old" links on your site to the old urls

3. Make sure the new URLs are properly linked to in your site structure (menus and XML and old blog posts).

It looks like your update may not be as "clean" as you realized.

Sad to say, sometimes it takes a bit for Google to "work it all out". One thing you need to check is to make sure the content on the original PageA is the same as where the user ends up on Page B or C. Link equity will not transfer if you are redirecting someone to a page where the content is substantially different. Good article here https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo

You can accomplish this IA with folders or with the slug, the key is how you interlink everything. That is how you can show your related articles and what the most important article is on a given topic.  The Bruce Clay article (IMHO) is still relevant, I think you do not need to get as granular due to things like Hummingbird.  I tend to think of organizing around a topic with a set of key words, vs getting super granular with the keyword siloing.  I think for the user it still makes sense that way as you need to make up an organizational structure that is simple and easy to understand vs having so many subcategories that they get confused.

Cheers!

If you wanted to look at relative search volume, you can look at Google Trends https://www.google.com/trends/   I would also see if you notice any trends in Google Search Console under Search Traffic > Search Analytics > Impressions

What your graph has me wondering is if this is an attribution issue with GA?  On the grey line, Moz is simply taking your GA traffic that is tagged as organic and showing it in the graph.  If you have an attribution issue in GA, organic traffic may be showing up as direct traffic.  If there is anything wonky in the traffic attribution, GA will put it as Direct. You have this classic article by Groupon that was a good example of how organic can be attributed incorrectly.   http://searchengineland.com/60-direct-traffic-actually-seo-195415

Look at your overall traffic in GA and then add a segment for organic traffic and then direct traffic.  If your overall traffic is constant and you see organic going down while direct traffic is going up, you have your answer.    As I understand it, this phenomenon is due to browser issues, so see if you have had more traffic recently from a given browser and that may give you another clue.

Another thing to check, you should be able to look at your organic traffic in GA and see if it is the same as Moz, or not. If not, ping the Moz folks to make sure your data from GA is coming in properly.  May be some data import issues there.

My other guess here is that your ranking is ok, but your click rate has been jacked.  Google Search console will show you CTR over time, and that may help.  Look and see, did you change meta descriptions?  Did you change up your schema markup so previously you had rich snippets in the SERP, but now you do not.  You could potentially keep ranking, but loose CTR.

These are all things I would look at, but at this point, your guess is as good as mine.  Looking through the above will probably prompt you to check other things that might give you an answer.

Good luck!

I agree with Moosa, but would add another layer of analysis on this.  You need to do a type of content audit on these pages.   You can go into GA to just look at traffic or use a tool (my new favorite) called URL Profiler to pull GA and OSE and Majestic link data plus social media shares on your sold product URLs.

For each sold product page you have two options:

1. 301 the page - If the "sold' page generates a fair amount of traffic, and even has some links coming in, you probably want to 301 redirect it.  The 301 needs to be to a page with similar semantic information.  Ideally this would be a main product category page so you can build the traffic to that page.

Example: If you sell Ford Mustangs and you have a lot of "sold" pages of Ford Mustangs, and those sold pages still get traffic and even have some links to them, you want to 301 those pages to your main category Ford Mustang page that has links to all of your Ford Mustangs that are still for sale.  Good for Google, good for the user.  Key point is that a) the "sold" pages are still generating value (traffic and links) and b) that you redirect to a semantically related page.  If you use a 301 to redirect to the home page that is a bad idea as it needs to be closely related in topic.   When looking at a "Ford Mustang for sale" page, a multiple car brands for sale page (your home page theme) is not as closely related to it as your main Ford Mustangs for sale category page.   It would also behoove you to really make that Ford Mustang for sale category page really kick a$$ content wise.

2. 410/404 the page - If you find a large group of "sold" pages that do not get very much traffic to them and/or they do not have much link equity, just let them 404/410.  Show a helpful not found page with links to other sections of your site and even a search function.   FYI - I like the 410 directive as it is a "permanently gone" directive vs a temporary one.

How do you get the data I am talking about on all the "sold" pages?  Using a tool like URL profiler, you put in all of your "sold" URLs and the software uses an API to get data from Search Console, GA, OSE and Majestic (among other tools) and pulls them into a single line per sheet.  You can then look for each URL any of the data and determine if you use option #1 or option #2.   Moz has an article on how to do a content audit you can search the web for other examples.  A simpler version of this would be to use the advanced search within GA and pull the organic landing page traffic on those pages.

Some SEOs would say that option #2 is blasphemy. ie. you always want to 301 redirect.  Why would you ever want to lose traffic by setting up a 410?  That will cause errors to show up in Search Console!  You will lose link equity and traffic!

This is why you have to perform the content audit.   If you have 1,000 pages but 800 of them send next to no traffic to your site and have generated 2 links, you can 410 the 800 pages and never notice the difference. You will not miss the traffic or links as they had none to begin with!   All those 800 pages are doing is wasting your crawl budget with Google and giving a signal to Google that you have a bunch of low quality pages on your website.  Also, don't panic when you see all the 410 in Search Console.  Just sort by date and then by priority to make sure that these are all the pages that you want to 410.  Over time (about 3-4 months) they will naturally fall out.

General rule of thumb, if a page 404s and it is supposed to 404 dont worry about it.  The Search Console 404 report does not mean that you are being penalized although it can be diagnostic.   If you block the 404 pages in robots.txt yea, it will take the 404 errors out of the Search Console report, but then Google never "deals" with those 404s.  It can take 3 months (maybe longer) to get things out of Search Console, I have noticed it taking longer here lately, but what you need to do first is ask the following questions

1. Do I still link internally to any of these /product/ URLs?  If you do, Google may assume that you are 404ing those pages by mistake and leave them in the report longer as if you are still linking internally to them they must be a viable page.

2. Do any of these old URLs have value?  Do they have links to them from external sites?  Did they used to rank for a KW?  You should probably 301 them to a semantically relevant page then vs 404ing and getting some use out of them.

If you have either of the above, Google may continue to remind you of the 404 as it thinks the page might be valuable and want to "help" you out.

You mention 5,000 URLs that were indexed and then you 404 them.  You cannot assume that Search Console works in real time or that Google checks all 5,000 of these URLs at the same time.  Google has a given crawl budget for your site on how often it will crawl a given page.  Some pages they crawl more often (home page) some pages they crawl less often.  They then have to process those crawls once they get the data back.  What you will see in a situation like this is that if you 404 several thousand pages, you will first see several hundred show up in your Search Console report, then the next day some more, then some more, etc.  Over time, the total will build and then may peak and then gradually start to fall off.  Google has to find the 404s, process them and then show them in the report.  You may see 500 of your 404 pages today, but then 3 months later, there may be 500 other 404 pages that show up in the report and those original 500 are now gone.  This is why you might be seeing 404 errors after 3 months in addition to the examples I gave above.

It would be great if the process were faster and the data was cleaner.  The report has a checkbox for "this is fixed" and that is great if you fixed something, but they need a checkbox for "this is supposed to 404" to help clear things out.  If I have learned anything about Search Console, it is helpful, but the data in many cases is not real time.

Good luck!

The rel=canonical is what you need to do right now to help fix this.  Google has already indexed all of those tabbed pages and you need to make sure that Google knows that they are subsections of the main page and how it all fits together.  The canonical is treated like a 301 redirect.  Doing that should take care of the extra pages indexed.  If you can 301 those tabbed pages that would be a good option as well, not a good option if you do not want to lose the content on those tabbed pages though.

Right now, I would not use no-follow on links or no-index meta tags on the tabbed pages. If you use no-follow, you are telling Google to not follow that tab link and so it is not able to crawl over the the tabbed page and see the canonical link.  Second, if you have a noindex meta on that tabbed page, it tells Google to take the page out of the index and would probably conflict with the canonical link as well.

The only way you would want to use no-follow or noindex meta tags or blocking in robots.txt is if 1) the content is not worth indexing and/or ranking and or 2) it is not in the index already and you want to keep Google out of this stuff.

Ultimately, I would try and get the stuff on the tabbed sections onto the main page and then use the noindex meta tag on the tabbed pages so that you can get rid of the tabbed pages all together and not work about losing the content that is in the tabbed section.  If you can do that, it would be a better approach than the canonical option, but it looks like you may not have that option at this time.  All those extra tab pages are just wasting Google's time crawling pages that do not matter (most likely).

If you did not care about the content on the tabbed pages, I would just 410 them right now and get rid of the links to the tabs on the main pages.

Hope the above makes sense, tried to answer the "it depends" scenarios.

Feel free to ignore this next part, but I have a separate question if you drop the whole tab pages issue and look at this at a higher level.  Looking at this subsection of URLs from above

• hotel-downtown-calgary
• hotel-downtown-calgary/gallery
• hotel-downtown-calgary/map
• hotel-downtown-calgary/facilities
• hotel-downtown-calgary/reviews
• hotel-downtown-calgary/in-the-area

Would not all the above pages really need to be about a single hotel or a category page on all the hotels in downtown calgary? Unless you have enough search query volume to support a separate page for each of them, seems like if you put the content on all the pages listed above into a single page, you would have a really awesome page about either a specific downtown calgary hotel or all the hotels in downtown calgary.

I agree with this.   I would just add, make sure, that whatever company you work with, they can explain themselves to you in plain English vs Geek Speak.  You need to understand what they are doing and why so that you can work with them on this project.  Ideally you can learn and collaborate with them.  SEO is not about sending the company off to work on stuff you dont understand and then they come back with results.  They could be buying links on spam sites and while you get a short term gain, you end up with a long term ruined site reputation with Google.  If they have issues being transparent, then walk away.

The concept that Google is trying to setup here is that your CSS and JS contain elements that are critical for the page to render.  The problem is that as the browser downloads them, they can block other resources from being downloaded.  This is because the browser wants to read these files to see everything they need to download to render the page. Part of fixing render blocking is to reduce the number of files that a browser has to download, especially those in the critical path (html, CSS, JS) that can block the downloading of other files (images, etc)

Google is getting even more specific in your case.   They are looking at the "above the fold" parts of your page.  What Google wants you to do is take any CSS or JS that you use to render what is "above the fold" on that page and inline that code into your HTML file.   That way when the browser downloads the HTML file it has all it needs to render the visible / "above the fold" part of the page vs having to wait for the CSS and/or JS files to download.

The problem is that defining "above the fold" is relative due to the multiple browser size and OS and devices that your web server sees on a regular basis.

If you have a really good front end developer, they can take the time to figure out what viewport size is the most common and then take all the CSS and JS and inline that (and note this may be different depending on the page) into your HTML (and this assumes that your CSS and JS do not bloat your HTML file size too much).  One approach is to take your most common large viewport size and then inline all those items into your HTML that are above the fold so you have everything covered as the viewport gets smaller.  The issue there (and this is also with most responsive sites) is that you have a lot of code bloat for your phone browsers.  You can also use a sniffer to determine what the size of the viewport is and then having the appropriate amount of CS and JS inlined on the fly.  I have also seen people suggesting that we should design websites for the phone first and then expand out from there.

This is the best website I have seen that talks about how all these files interact and what Google is really getting at

https://varvy.com/pagespeed/critical-render-path.html

Here is what I would do.

1. Have a single CSS file for your site and host it on your server, not an external domain.  This is best practice.  Take the time to strip out all of the stuff you do not use out of the CSS to get the file size down.  Minify and compress it, reference your CSS in your header.  This may help with the render blocking as you are reducing the number of files requested to just 1, but it may not help with the above the fold render blocking.

If you want to move forward with with "fixing" the above the fold render blocking.  Extract the CSS that is critical to render above the fold items on your site (noting the caveats above) and place it inline within your HTML file and then put the rest in your single CSS file. https://varvy.com/pagespeed/optimize-css-delivery.html

2. Have a single JS file and host it on your server.  If there is any external JS try and see if you can host it within your single JS file.  Strip out all the JS you do not use to get the file size down.  Minify and compress it.

If you want to get past the render blocking above the fold item above, figure out what JS is needed to render the page above the fold.  Inline that JS within your HTML and then setup a single file for all the other JS and then defer loading of that file using this technique: https://varvy.com/pagespeed/defer-loading-javascript.html

I noticed your external JS file to Googleadservices.  You may not be able to put that JS into your main JS file and have to keep the external JS reference.  I would then try and defer the loading of that using the technique above.  You need to do some testing to make sure that doing this does not throw off how your ads are displayed or tracked.  I would also make sure your GA or other web tracking JS code is inlined as well, otherwise you risk throwing off your web stats.

This is what makes all of this tricky.   The Google page speed tool is just looking at a list of best practices and seeing if they are present or not.  They are not looking to see if your page is actually getting faster or not, or if you change any of these things if they throw off the function of your site.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

PageSpeed Insights analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page faster

This is why with all of this you need to use a tool that shows actual page speed and will show a waterfall chart with timings to see how everything interacts.  webpagetest.org is a common one.

It gets really complicated, really fast, and this is where a a really good front end guy or gal is worth it to look at these things. I would start with my initial simple suggestions above and not sweat the above the fold stuff.  Test your site with actual speed and see how it does.  You can also setup GA to give you page speed data.  You can then decide if you need to take it to the next level.

Another thing you can try (I have not been able to get this to work for me) is that Google has a tool that can do all the "above the fold" inlining and other speed tricks for you

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/

Just like above, I would benchmark your performance and then see if this makes a difference on your site.

Good luck!

Thanks Donna!