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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

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

Right, I hear you on that, and honestly, that scenario you have posited, is the reason I haven't done anything yet on this.  I agree that is the ideal way to do it, but I am not sure I can.  I just don't have the time or resources and I agree that the positive effect could take some time...

So, I am curious, what you think the quickest route to a positive effect would be?

C

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

So, I have finally decided to remove our Search Results pages from Google.  This is a big dealio, but our traffic has consistently been declining since 2012 and it's the only thing I can think of.

So, the reason they got indexed is back in 2012, we put linked tags on our product pages, but they linked to our search results pages.  So, over time we had hundreds of thousands of search results pages indexed.

By tag pages I mean:

Keywords: Kittens, Doggies, Monkeys, Dog-Monkeys, Kitten-Doggies

Each of these would be linked to our search results pages, i.e. http://oursite.com/Search.html?text=Kitten-Doggies

So, I really think these pages being indexed are causing much of our traffic problems as there are many more Search Pages indexed than actual product pages.  So, my question is... Should I go ahead and remove the links/tags on the product pages first?  OR... If I remove those, will Google then not be able to re-crawl all of the search results pages that it has indexed?  Or, if those links are gone will it notice that they are gone, and therefore remove the search results pages they were previously pointing to?

So, Should I remove the links/tags from the product page (or at least decrease them down to the top 8 or so) as well as add the no-follow no-index to all the Search Results pages at the same time?

OR, should I first no-index, no-follow ALL the search results pages and leave those tags on the product pages there to give Google a chance to go back and follow those tags to all of the Search Results pages so that it can get to all of those Search Results pages in order to noindex,. no follow them?  Otherwise will Google not be able find these pages?

Can someone comment on what might be the best, safest, or fastest route?

Thanks so much for any help you might offer me!!

Craig

So, I wanted to see if you have a suggestion on the best way to handle it?  Should I remove the links/tags from the product page (or at least decrease them down to the top 8 or so) as well as add the no-follow no-index to all the Search Results pages at the same time?

OR, should I first no-index, no-follow ALL the search results pages and leave those tags on the product pages there to give Google a chance to go back and follow those tags to all of the Search Results pages so that it can get to all of those Search Results pages in order to noindex,. no follow them?  Otherwise will Google not be able find these pages?

Can you tell me which would be the best, fastest and safest routes?

In 2012, we got hit with something... I have always assumed Panda...

We have hundreds of thousands of products on our site.  Prior to the traffic drop, our old site design listed a small number of keywords tags on the product pages.

About 10 or so...

After the site re-design, we allowed all of the keyword tags to appear on these product pages and also linked them to

our search results pages.

I know that one thing this did is cause a lot of these Search Results pages to be indexed.

But our traffic has been constantly declining since then...  I wonder what would happen if I just went back to the old with a smaller number of keywords listed and not linked?

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

Craig

Thanks for your answer Dirk!

Craig

Hmm.  That is interesting Ryan.  That's good info on the description.  Interesting they say to put the price in there.  I have always thought that wouldn't be a good idea since prices can change...

Thanks for your answer.

Craig

What to do if you have hundreds of thousands of a particular product.

Comic Books for example.

Is it ok to have the words Comic Book in the title and H1 tag as long as it is qualified?

For example, if I have the following as both the Title tag and the H1 tag.

Comic Book  - Spider Man Versus Wolverine

Comic Book - Silver Surfer Goes Home to Visit Mom.

Comic Book - Superman Gets a New Kitten

Comic Book  - Wonder Woman is More Wonderful Than You Know

As of now, I have been doing it this way, but only in the title tag.  However, Google has been using my H1 tag as my title, so in the search results, I am only getting:

"Superman Gets a New Kitten"

And I am afraid that that is leaving out important info for searchers, especially qualifying that the product is a Comic Book and if someone is searching for a Comic Book, I need that to return.

But I don't want any 'more' trouble from the Panda.   Again, this will be hundreds of thousands of products.

Thanks for your help!

Craig

I noticed another post on this, but I have another question.  I am getting this message from Analytics:

Property http://www.example.com is receiving data from redundant hostnames. Consider setting up a 301 redirect on your website, or make a search and replace filter that strips "www." from hostnames. Examples of redundant hostnames: example.com, www.example.com.

We don't have a 301 in place that manages this and I am quite concerned about handling that the right way.  We do have a canonical on our homepage that says:

rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/" /> I asked on another site how to safely set up our 301 and I got this response:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://www.example.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L,NE]

Is this the best way of handling it?  Are there situations where this would not be the best way?

We do have a few subdomains like beta.example.com in use and have a rather large site, so I just want to make sure I get it right.

Thanks for your help!

Craig

Our search results pages are, unfortunately, heavily indexed by Google.  While the long term plan is to replace these somehow with our product pages, in the short term we are doing all we can to improve things.

One of our issues is that we don't have a canonical link or rel="next" or rel="prev" on these pages.

Would like to add these to consolidate duplicate content as well as help Google drill down within these pages to crawl the links within them.

The concern is...  If ten people arrive at our site via:

http://www.oursite.com/?goodstuff=puppies&page=1

and 10 people also arrive at our site via:

http://www.oursite.com/?goodstuff=puppies&page=2

Would adding rel="next" and rel="prev" potentially have a damaging effect on us by removing one of these entry points and therefore removing 10 potential visitors?

Or would it still show both links, but instead would show the canonical in both locations?  In short, could adding these tags actually backfire?

Thanks very much!

Craig