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Thanks for your response!! - Craig

So, with our 600 or so category pages, I was curious... on each of these category pages we show the top 12 products for that category.

In trying to increase click through rate, I wonder if it would be prudent to use some of the strategies I see used for Blog posts with thee category pages.

i.e. Instead of Category Name - Website Name

How about:

Top 12 Kitty Litters We Carry - View the Best and the Rest!

Or something like that.

And then in the description, I could put, "Number 8 made my jaw drop!!!" (Ok, kidding about that one...)

But serious about the initial question...

Thanks!

Craig

Good stuff Patrick!  Yeah, I am thinking I hit the sweet spot.  It's that clickthrough rate that's rocking my world a bit, but who knows?  I feel like Google is still processing our pages though as we have close to 900,000 products, so I am looking forward to more improvements I hope...  Plus, I still have more mods to make.  Believe it or not, I actually did make these changes to a sub-set of our products that had the most to gain, but also had the least to lose.  I just thought it would take longer for me to see improvements, so hopefully the Googles aren't playing tricks on me.

Thanks for the quality answer!  I really appreciate it.

Craig

Recently, I did a couple of major SEO mods on our e-commerce site.

Here's what I did:

A.  No-indexed hundreds of thousands of Search Results pages.

B.  Changed the URL structure for the better of our product pages.

I literally made these changes about 3 weeks ago and I am seeing some very interesting results in such a short period of time.

Here is one example.  My product pages increased impressions by about 20% or so, but the real crazy thing is the increase in click through rate on my product pages.  All of a sudden I am getting about a 95% clickthrough rate!??!?!  Previously I was getting around 58%.

Any ideas on this?  Is it a normal fluctuation that goes away?  Or can I expect it to stay or even improve?

Thanks!

Craig

Hey Dirk,

Thanks again for the great insight here.

I have a follow-up however...

On our current product pages pre-URL change, the URL structure looks like this:

Let's say, for example purposes, that two of our very top keywords are "Calico Cats" and "Calico Kittens."

example.com/Calico-Cats-Kittens/12345/Tiny-Cat-Playing.html

Before this site re-mod we didn't have any actual category pages, the categories just linked to our search results pages as talked about previously.

The new category pages would look like this:

example.com/Calico-Cats/Calico-Kittens/Sub-Category-One/Sub-Category-Two

So, my question is first for the category page:

Which is better:
example.com/Calico-Cats/Calico-Kittens/Sub-Category-One/Sub-Category-Two/ 
example.com/Calico-Cats/Kittens/Sub-Category-One/Sub-Category-Two/

Is there any concern here with Repeating the word "Calico?"

And for the product page:

example.com/Calico-Cats/Tiny-Cat-Playing-12345.html
(Excluding the "Calico-Kittens" category level to decrease the number of folders and also, because of the concern that including "Calico" twice may be an issue?
OR

example.com/Calico-Cats/Calico-Kittens/Tiny-Cats-Playing-12345.html
(including an extra category layer, but only because "Calico-Kittens" is one of our top, most valuable keywords)

There will be hundreds of thousands of product pages like this.

Thanks again for your help!
Craig

example.com/Calico-Cats/Calico-Kittens/Sub-Category-One/Sub-Category-Two

Massive changes to our stock media site and structure here.

While we have an extensive category system previously our category pages have only been our search pages with ID numbers for

sorting categories.  Now we have individual category pages.

We have about 600 categories with about 4 max tiers.

We have about 1,000,000 total products and issues with products appearing to be duplicate.

Our current URL structure for producta looks like this:

http://example.com/main-category/12345/product-name.htm

Here is how I was planning on doing the new structure:

Cat tier 1:

http://example.com/category-one/

Cat tier 2:

http://example.com/category-one/category-two/

Cat tier 3:

http://example.com/category-one-category-two/category-three

Cat tier 4:

http://example.com/category-one-category-two-category-three/category-four/

Product:

http://example.com/category-one-category-two-category-three/product-name-12345.htm

Thoughts?

Thanks!

Craig

Sounds good!  Thanks again!

C

This is a big help as I am finalizing the category pages now.

So our site is big, getting close to 1,000,000 products in the store.

Each product can belong to up to 3 sub-cats.  Our internal category structure is generally like this:

Widgets->Awesome Widgets->Blue Widgets

or

Widgets->Awesome Widgets->Large Widgets->Large Blue Widgets

So, currently, my structure is like this:

1.  Home Page Links To:

Primary Category 1
    Primary Category 2
    Primary Category 3
    Primary Category 4

2. Each Primary Category Page:

1.  Links any sub-categories
     2.  Has a list of all products in that category with pagination linking to their product pages.

3.  The Product Page Links back to:

1. Primary Category Page
     2. Each of the 3 Sub-Categories' Pages that Product Belongs To.
     3.  A small number of related products.

Generally each sub-cat will have thousands if not tens of thousands of sub-products.

How does this sound and do you have any advice related to this?

Thanks again!! :):):):):):):):)  You get extra smilies for awesome help.

Craig

I was talking about my search pages specifically, either adding a meta robots no-index,no-follow OR just a no-index.  I just went ahead and added no-follow.

So, good point on the screaming frog.

Currently, the site is organized like this: HomePage -> Several links to many variations of the Search Page -> Product Pages

The new organization will be:

Home Page -> Various Category Pages  -> Various Sub-Category Pages (With products on them and pagination to show all products) -> Possibly Other Sub-Category Pages (With products on them and pagination)

Then on the product pages there will be links back to the primary and secondary category pages.

A. How does that sound and

B.  So, if I have Product pages that are already indexed could no-indexing the Search pages mean these pages get removed?  Or, if they are already in the index, are they safe?

Thanks again for taking the time to help and answer!!

Craig

Hey Dirk,

I have one more follow-up on this if you don't mind.  My SEO auditor said I should both no-index AND no-follow the search results pages.

This concerns me a little bit as I am concerned it may have a negative effect on my Product pages as I will have to make sure they will be found in another way, which I will do, but it will take time of course.

Any reason why you just suggested no-index and did not include the no-follow and do you have any other insight on that?

Thanks!

Craig

We have asked a few questions related to this process on Moz and wanted to give a breakdown of our journey as it will likely be helpful to others!

A couple of months ago, we updated our robots.txt file with several pages that we did not want to be indexed.  At the time, we weren't checking WMT as regularly as we should have been and in a few weeks, we found that apparently one of the robots.txt files we were blocking was a dynamic file that led to the blocking of over 950,000 of our pages according to webmaster tools.  Which page was causing this is still a mystery, but we quickly removed all of the entries.

From research, most people say that things normalize in a few weeks, so we waited.  A few weeks passed and things did not normalize.  We searched, we asked and the number of "blocked" pages in WMT which had increased at a rate of a few hundred thousand a week were decreasing at a rate of a thousand a week.  At this rate it would be a year or more before the pages were unblocked.

This did not change.  Two months later and we were still at 840,000 pages blocked.

We posted on the Google Webmaster Forum and one of the mods there said that it would just take a long time to normalize.  Very frustrating indeed considering how quickly the pages had been blocked.

We found a few places on the interwebs that suggested that if you have an issue/mistake with robots.txt that you can submit a reconsideration request.  This seemed to be our only hope.  So, we put together a detailed reconsideration request asking for help with our blocked pages issue.

A few days later, to our horror, we did not get a message offering help with our robots.txt problem.  Instead, we received a message saying that we had received a penalty for inbound links that violate Google's terms of use.  Major backfire.  We used an SEO company years ago that posted a hundred or so blog posts for us.  To our knowledge, the links didn't even exist anymore.  They did....

So, we signed up for an account with removeem.com.  We quickly found many of the links posted by the SEO firm as they were easily recognizable via the anchor text.  We began the process of using removem to contact the owners of the blogs.  To our surprise, we got a number of removals right away!  Others we had to contact another time and many did not respond at all.  Those we could not find an email for, we tried posting comments on the blog.

Once we felt we had removed as many as possible, we added the rest to a disavow list and uploaded it using the disavow tool in WMT.  Then we waited...

A few days later, we already had a response.  DENIED.  In our request, we specifically asked that if the request were to be denied that Google provide some example links.  When they denied our request, they sent us an email and including a sample link.  It was an interesting example.  We actually already had this blog in removem.  The issue in this case was, our version was a domain name, i.e. www.domainname.com and the version google had was a wordpress sub domain, i.e. www.subdomain.wordpress.com.

So, we went back to the drawing board.  This time we signed up for majestic SEO and tied it in with removem.  That added a few more links.  We also had records from the old SEO company we were able to go through and locate a number of new links.  We repeated the previous process, contacting site owners and keeping track of our progress.  We also went through the "sample links" in WMT as best as we could (we have a lot of them) to try to pinpoint any other potentials.

We removed what we could and again, disavowed the rest.  A few days later, we had a message in WMT.  DENIED AGAIN!  This time it was very discouraging as it just didn't seem there were any more links to remove.  The difference this time, was that there was NOT an email from Google.  Only a message in WMT.  So, while we didn't know if we would receive a response, we responded to the original email asking for more example links, so we could better understand what the issue was.

Several days passed we received an email back saying that THE PENALTY HAD BEEN LIFTED!  This was of course very good news and it appeared that our email to Google was reviewed and received well.

So, the final hurdle was the reason that we originally contacted Google.  Our robots.txt issue.  We did not receive any information from Google related to the robots.txt issue we originally filed the reconsideration request for.  We didn't know if it had just been ignored, or if there was something that might be done about it.  So, as a last ditch final effort, we responded to the email once again and requested help as we did the other times with the robots.txt issue.

The weekend passed and on Monday we checked WMT again.  The number of blocked pages had dropped over the weekend from 840,000 to 440,000!  Success!  We are still waiting and hoping that number will continue downward back to zero.

So, some thoughts:

1.  Was our site manually penalized from the beginning, yet without a message in WMT?  Or, when we filed the reconsideration request, did the reviewer take a closer look at our site, see the old paid links and add the penalty at that time?  If the latter is the case then...

2.  Did our reconsideration request backfire?  Or, was it ultimately for the best?

3.  When asking for reconsideration, make your requests known?  If you want example links, ask for them.  It never hurts to ask!  If you want to be connected with Google via email, ask to be!

4.  If you receive an email from Google, don't be afraid to respond to it.  I wouldn't over do this or spam them.  Keep it to the bare minimum and don't pester them, but if you have something pertinent to say that you have not already said, then don't be afraid to ask.

Hopefully our journey might help others who have similar issues and feel free to ask any further questions.

Thanks for reading!

TheCraig

Hey Dan,

I am actually not so concerned about the pages being indexed.  I don't really think they were ever de-indexed.  Unless I am wrong, I think they were de-ranked.

I know others have said that when they "disallowed" large portions of their sites, their pages dropped in the rankings, and did not necessarily disappear.  This is more what I want to see recovery from.

Thanks!

Craig

Dirk,

THANKS!!!  Thanks for the solid response.  I guess my only concern is, we are still getting traffic from these indexed Search pages... and I need to minimize the hit from removing them.  Any other more advanced methods I could use?  Or.... In that case, would you recommend I do a combination of using the URL removal tool PLUS removing the tags?

I just need to do this as right as possible.  I can't afford too much of a hit here (if any.)  But, at the same time, we are losing traffic so fast, and have lost so much traffic, I don't have any choice at this point.  We have doubled our product pages in the past 3 years and yet have lost about half our traffic.

Thanks again!

Craig

Thank you my brother...

Very much appreciate the time you took for some thorough answers here....

Very good stuff and VERY much appreciated.

I had a chat with my SEO auditor today and he suggested no-indexing, no following the search pages and in about 30 days remove the product page links.

So, I will likely do that.

Much appreciation to you - Craig