Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi again JS,

I think it's great that you continue to evaluate your platform from all perspectives and evaluate its strengths/weaknesses. Many times, a platform can do a lot of the basics well, but fall short on the details that differentiate us from our competition. For example, opencart may do the basic SEO requirements well, but not include ecommerce microdata (schema.org) which have a high impact on our search listings.

You can do a lot of harm/good with the robots.txt file - like deindex entire website (probably not a good thing) or block certain directories (your /product issue). I would gain some deeper knowledge about what you can do with the robots.txt file and how you need it to perform for your business.

Hi BBuck,

I think I can help out in this area;

- is it a good thing for SEO?

A Q&A section can absolutely be beneficial to SEO. Any value-added content to relevant topics is great to include in your website and User Generated Content (UGC) is a goal of many successful SEO strategies.

- Or a potential pitfall for SEO?

It's a pitfall if it is not value-added (spammy) or negative to your business objectives.

- If it is used often and users post relevant topics related to the website content, will it help the overall DA and websites SERP performance?

Consistency is a common trait of successful campaigns and value-added, topic related content has a high impact on domain authority (DA) and search engine ranking position (SERP) performance. It can only help you achieve your goals when used properly.

- Are there inherent risks for website security when using a Q&A?

That would depend on your own unique website environment (server host, plugins, ect) and I would encourage you to have consistent communication with your hosting provider and website manager.

Make sure to continue to screen UGC for spam related content, non-value added content, and other innapropriate content.

- Are there any other questions I should be asking?

Yeah, most of the time Here are a few to keep you thinking...

Are you making it easy for your users to ask questions?

Are you making it easy for those responsible to answer questions?

Should you require a login/purchase/information to post questions?

Where should you show the questions? (from a UI perspective, has more impact for ecommerce companies)

Best of luck!

the URL remover tool would be one of my last options, since I too would be afraid of any authority vanishing with the old link.

Google must have some reason to continue to index the pages and I wouldn't want them removed until I'm positive I gained back all the authority I could, from these old pages.

• Are you certain the 301 redirects are active and working?

• Can you add canonical tags to the 301'ed pages?

• Make sure that none of the URLs in the 301 URL chain are disallowed by a robots.txt file. If they were in the redirect chain, Google would not be able to properly crawl the new page and properly index.

That last point may be what's preventing a portion of the old URLs from dropping, if they are being blocked in the robots.txt file.

Hi JStrong,

Great question to be asking and an important topic to be doing your due diligence on, especially when dealing with an eCommerce related website.

Google uses a sitemap as a guideline for crawling your site. So, just because you put a URL in your sitemap, doesn't mean that they URL will actually be indexed. You can see those stats in your Google Webmaster Tools account, under the Sitemap area. It will display how many URLs are in the sitemap and how many out of those URLs are indexed.

If you do not want certain pages to be indexed by Google, then you would need to adjust your robots.txt file to give Google those instructions.

As long as you have the correct Canonical configurations, you should avoid any duplicate content issues from the URLs you've described above.

Good luck!

I guess the better question would be to look at if they are actually converting.

You answered your own question, sort of!

Are then worth tracking just because they are sending traffic?

No! A keyword is not worth tracking just because it is sending traffic. If the traffic is of too low quality, then incurring a cost to track it is probably not efficient. However, those low quality, high traffic keywords are great to identify to know how to adjust from that point. I.e. should you create a new landing page targeted towards the keyword that is sending a lot of traffic?

Are people who are looking for Ice Cream upset when then end up at a place that doesn't sell Ice Cream.

That depends. 'Ice Cream' is a very generic keyword and a portion of the traffic searching for that term and landing at a website that doesn't sell ice cream would be upset. However, you'd want to look at the long-tail terms for that keyword and really identify what the traffic is trying to accomplish and why they came to your website.

I add keywords from the keyword opportunities list if they achieve the following:

• Is unique enough from my current list of keywords to warrant tracking (because every keyword tracked through Moz cost me some $)

• Does it work towards completing one of my goals (i.e. does the keyword drive sales, leads, any valuable traffic)

• Are my competitors bidding or trying to rank for the term and I should be as well

• Do I have the room in my Moz account to track the keyword

That last one is important because I tend to max out my keyword quota and every new keyword that I add I need to remove other keywords to make room.

Hello Hardley111,

First you need to ask yourself this question: 'What are my business objectives and goals for measuring company success?'

Once you answer that question you can then begin to identify the keywords that help accomplish the goals needed to consider your campaigns a success.

For example, an Ecommerce company might have a business objective of, 'increase company revenue' and the goal may be 'drive more sales through organic search.'

In the above scenario you wouldn't want to optimize your site for all your keyword terms, you'd instead want to do an organic and paid search analysis to see which keywords are driving organic sales. Keep in mind that paid and organic usually work together, supporting each other's channels; so, it would be beneficial to analyze both acquisition channels and see how they attributing to organic sales growth.

Once you find those keywords then you can create, or identify, the top landing pages for each term and then perform your on-page optimization.

TL&DR

• Identify your business' objectives

• Identify the metrics that define a successful campaign. (i.e. revenue)

• Identify the keywords that support the metrics above. (i.e. buy PRODUCT NAME)

• Optimize for those keywords. Preferably 1 landing page per keyword/ad group.

Hi skifr - Have you tried using the URL remover tool in GWT? And if you really want those pages out of the search engine, how about a noindex tag on the old domain?

Thanks for the thorough response! Ecommerce sure does add a level of complexity to the whole process.

Hi ycheung - I believe you have a few things you can consider.

First we need to decide the following: Is it useful / beneficial to have the calendar indexed by Google? Will it bring in quality traffic to your website?

If the answer is 'No' then you should include a noindex rule (either meta or through the robots.txt file) to avoid indexing the pages all together.

If it is beneficial to have your calendar indexed by Google then you identify the main page of the calendar and have its child pages use a Canonical tag to identify the 1 main page as the appropriate page for Google to be indexing. This is usually done when the child pages are very similar to the parent, causing duplicate content just like in your example.

Both solutions should resolve your duplicate content issue.

I agree that you should have consistency. I'd suggest going with Page Title - it's the industry standard.

Also, browser title limits what you're actually speaking to since the Page Title is more than just the Browser Title.

Hello Moz Community!

I'm hoping to get some advice around intra-linking practices and the benefits when a page that is being linked to has a different canonical tag than it's own URL. Confused? Allow me to elaborate.

Scenario:

Background: Ecommerce Company is trying to increase its organic ranking for key, broad terms in the cycling industry.

Ecommerce company is trying to rank its category pages for a main term. To help this, the company focusing on increasing the quality of its intra-linking structure (the links and anchor texts that link to another page within the site).

Example goal: to have it's Road Cassettes category page rank for 'Road Cassettes'

Company's 'cassettes' main category page is here: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/

And the company uses filtered navigation logic to drill down into 'road cassettes' specifically: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/?page_no=1&fq=ATR_RoadBiking:True

SEOs are instructed to include occasional links back to this page, with SEO friendly anchor text, to help strengthen it's authority for the main term.

The Issue / Question:

Main category URL: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/

Road Cassettes category URL: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/?page_no=1&fq=ATR_RoadBiking:True

Road Cassettes Canonical URL: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/

The canonical URL of the filtered Road Cassettes category is its main category URL. Will Company be able to effectively rank its Road Cassettes category URL for 'Road Cassettes' if the canonical URL is the main category? Should the canonical URL not be the main category?

OR

Will increasing the intra-linking to the Road Cassettes URL help the main category URL rank for 'Road Cassettes' - by passing all it's authority?