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Option 2 sounds like the logical option - I don't think a flat structure would make sense for what you have to work with. Interlink your content from other pages and don't try to be clever with structures here - it's whatever makes the most sense to what you are trying to do. Of course, it is ideal to try not to place any content too far down the tree but if you have no options in what you can and can't do with changing the structure itself, then I would work with what I have. -Andy

Yeap it's really rare. Even more rare that WMT doesn't scream any error. To check my mistake, i've run a screaming frog too. Sorry.

I think Thomas is correct - Google will show whatever they think is the best user experience - IN THEIR OPINION. But in looking at the pages - there is something on that page that does not seems to be on the other - I'm attaching a screenshot - its the text phrase at the bottom of the page  - my norwegian is rusty ( ha ha ha) but it looks like that text block has the same brand names there that are in the meta description in serps - see attachment of image What I have been seeing for over a year now is when the meta description matches text on the page - then its more likely to show in the serps that way - but other than that I don't know of a way to "force" google to serve up your meta description in serps. 0ys80bendz81o780lfbi

Thank you all! I have forwarded this to the owner of the page, so now we'll just sit back and see the effects

Hi, Andy. Thank you so much for the insights

Usually, the reason is because category pages tend to be light on content and thus, not as indexable. And sometimes category pages are noindex due to this. Google is likely looking at your product page and finding it more relevant, based on content, than the category page for people who are looking for "sleeping bags."

The most popular sitemap plugin for Magento appears to be this one: https://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/xml-sitemap-generator-splitter.html, the XML Sitemap Generator & Splitter.

Logan is correct--if you look at the canonical tag in your example in the source code you're not using the full URL, you're only using a snippet (the relative) URL. So, rather than /barn-junior/tilbehor/hansker-votter/junior you need to change it to https://www.gsport.no/barn-junior/tilbehor/hansker-votter/junior.

So obvious. Thank you, Dirk

Where would you rather buy... Amazon where you can't get a phone number, Walmart where the people working know nothing about specialty products, Joe Schmoe who is only trying to sell discount and will not reply to email because he knows nothing about what he sells.   Lots of people buy from us because we have more helpful information on our site than all of our retail competitors and the manufacturers combined.  We know that because we hear it  * Every Day * in our customer reviews. The ads that we run do not say buy from us.  We never even use the world "buy" or "purchase" or "we sell" on the website.  At the same time that we run our own ads on our website, we are running adsense ads that go to other businesses.  Our ads look like theirs but have our domain in obvious font at the bottom of the ad.  Its obvious who they are buying from. That's on our tiny niche retails site. The other site where we sell is a large authority info site with a small store.  We have a link to the "store" in our persistent navigation and it gets clicked a lot.  Our product descriptions are 10x as long as our competitors and our informative articles are much more detailed.  We link to informative articles from product pages and to product pages to informative articles.  We can lose customers to information and we can gain customers from information.  It's OK if we lose customers to information because that reduces returned products.   They can also click an ad to our competitors.  But we have no problem making sales and have never heard from anyone anything displeasing that we provide information and sales.

"Why not do parent category by type of clothing - "snowsuites", "sweaters" and so on and then have boy-girls filters inside?" "I acknowledge that implementing a filter for "boys" and "girls" would be the best way to solve this redundant categorization, but that would simply be to expensive for our client." That being said, canonicals will help direct the juice to the right (/outwear/) page and away from /outwear/girls and /outwear/boys. The only other option I can see is to have an overview category (/outwear/) and then deindex the subcategories in robots. disallow: /outwear/girls* disallow: /outwear/boys* But that only helps Google with what you already have. If someone directly links the /outwear/boys/ page, that will get lost. So canonicals would seem to be the way to go in the absence of filters.

Check out this awesome post by AJ Kohn To answer your question... "What I’ve observed over the last few years is that pages that haven’t been crawled recently are given less authority in the index. To be more blunt, if a page hasn’t been crawled recently, it won’t rank well." "The pages that aren’t crawled as often are pages with little to no PageRank. CrawlRank is the difference in this very large pool of pages. You win if you get your low PageRank pages crawled more frequently than the competition."

Content that adds value to the user experience is never bad - more content, more reasons to rank, better information for the user to take action. Ecommerce websites are more difficult to handle though - the goal is usually to convert to a sale and sometimes content can get in the way of that happening. If you've A/B tested and found that conversions are greater without it, then good for you! You've identified a barrier to your visitors and eliminated it for better conversions. What needs to be weighed is the amount of conversions - does the content bring in more, new traffic and eventually converts? I.e. is the conversion volume greater with the content than without it. If no, then stick with the A/B test results. Putting content down the page may help you rank, but is it helping your visitors? You don't want to shove content onto a page just because you think it belongs there - is it beneficial to the user? If no, can you put that content somewhere else where it is beneficial to the user? Amazon is common SERP to beat, let's take a look at one of their category pages: http://www.amazon.com/Outlet/b/ref=sv_gb_3?ie=UTF8&node=517808 We see that they do include a small snippet of text at the top, to describe the category. Then they give the user what is expected, a lot of products to view; and at the bottom they have a longer category description (sometimes reviews and related category information). This is a common way to structure category pages. But, your market may be different so it may be worthwhile to brainstorm how your page structure would most benefit your users.

Great! Please let us know how it goes so we can all learn more about it. Thanks!

Thank you guys! This was just what I needed. Extra thumbs up for your article Amelia!

this shouldn't have any impact from a SERP point of view, however this seems a very easy thing to get around, especially if your customers twig on - simply change their IP location until they get a price they are happy with, why not simply have one price and charge different shipping rates. The only time Google may have a problem is in PPC land. PLA's you have to show the price the customer is going to pay and as you wont know the location of the person at the time of them searching you are probably going to show them a cheaper price on the advert and then a higher price on the Ads (you will either get complaints or a high bounce rate) both of which Google wont like. Too many complaints and you could in theory have your account suspended. Organic - not really many issues Paid - Google wont like, and this will affect your QS meaning you have to pay more to get more of your adverts shown, which will have a high bounce rate further driving down your QS score meaning you pay more to get your adverts shown.

This would be a great addition to our web tools! Thanks so much for the suggestions. I can absolutely see how valuable this would be. Must suggestion would be posting this as a feature suggestion. Here's the feature request forum we use to collect ideas: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums/293194-seomoz-pro-feature-requests The teams at SEOmoz pay close attention to these requests and we make additions and updates to our tools often based on submissions just like these. I hope this will help.

Hello Ignitas, I recently cleared 2 layers of slugs from the url of a page I was optimising.  I changed it from domain.co.uk/sub-folder/slug/key-phrase/ to just domain.co.uk/key-phrase/ and after a couple of weeks since Google indexed the change I've not seen any major uplift.  Still hovering between 7th and 9th place. I suspect in time it may help as it will be easier for people to add deep links to my landing page with a simpler URL.  I think now people just link to the homepage as the full url is too long to include but thats just a theory. I agree with you that shorter ones look better and when I look at competitors who hold top positions for my phrases they almost all have shorter slug-free urls so I'm continuing to move that way even if I haven't seen the ranking increases to back it up yet. Steve

Nofollowing some of the links would not help. Google changed the algorithm awhile back, so the PageRank allotted to nofollow links simply disappears, instead of being allocated to other links on the page.