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Thanks for your response!! - 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

Hi Craig, If the keyword appears twice in the url it should be acceptable. What I normally do is to look at the url & judge if it still looks "natural" (with "natural" off course is quite subjective). If it looks stuffed, I change, if not I keep it. Check the 'stuffed' examples here: http://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/2014/09/09/url-keyword-stuffing-spam-filtering/ Sorry I cannot be more specific, it's a bit of a grey area. Dirk

Hi Craig, In general - the structure looks ok - just wondering how you going to manage to keep 1mio products a reasonable number of clicks from the homepage. rgds Dirk

If this was my site, I would stop linking to tag pages and search results pages.  I would also block them from being indexed. It is very possible that the search results pages are causing issues.  Google said back in 2007... "Typically, web search results don’t add value to users, and since our core goal is to provide the best search results possible, we generally exclude search results from our web search index. " Matt Cutts comments about it here and on a similar subject here.

It's a pretty old page, so take it with a grain of salt. Mostly what they're getting at I think is their preference for facts over sales copy when it comes to granular data. Still, things like page counts plus author and illustrator information within the H1 and Titles could help diversify your hundreds of thousands of pages.

Rewrites are generally regarded as the best way to handle this kind of redirect, but your DNS provider likely has their own redirect system in place that can implement the same functionality without modifying your site's .htaccess. Same result, different technique. The reason I use my DNS with a "www" subdomain record to forward to my non-www domain is because WordPress sometimes has issues with using RewriteRule. It seems to break permalinks. I always just set it once with my DNS host and never think about it again.

Check out topic from a few months ago- http://moz.com/community/q/ecommerce-problem-with-canonicol-rel-next-rel-prev How old is the site? In my experience, I've found it best to first see how things are actually being indexed, which pages are showing up in SERPS, and what the user behavior is.

I agree with Takeshi, couple additions. If you do go the route of changing your search URL structure etc. I would not deindex your old search pages, I would 301 redirect them to the new pages you are creating.  I would then setup new search pages behind a folder that you disallow in robots.txt to keep Google out of those results and into your more important pages. The apples to apples comparisons make sense too.  Product pages always convert better as it is the page where the product "lives" I can see why Google ranks your search result page for "RevoStock Fishing Boat" as it gives users the best options for accessing all your fishing boat videos. http://www.revostock.com/SearchResult-Empty.html?text=fishing boat&cat1[]=1 If you look at any of your fishing boat video pages on that search result page, they are pretty much identical examples I see at least 40-50 product pages like this http://www.revostock.com/Stock-Video-Footage/229719/Fishing-boat.htm http://www.revostock.com/Stock-Video-Footage/229730/Fishing-boat.htm http://www.revostock.com/Stock-Video-Footage/229746/Fishing-boat.htm same URL, title tags, h1, even the slug at the end Fishing-boat.htm etc just the variation with the ID in the middle of the URL and on the page. Google is looking for the authority page on your site for "Fishing boats", but with all the product pages almost the same, I can see why it would point to the search result page as it is a major hub for your content   You also mention that "On the product pages, we do show the keywords related to the item and then link back out to the Search Results pages from these. "  This is another signal to Google that those search result pages are important. Getting back to the conversion point again, you still should look towards using a category page to rank on your head terms vs the product pages due to your inventory.  Lets say you wanted to rank for "Fishing Boat Footage".  What product page would you send someone to?  You have a ton of choices on your site and so seems to make sense to have a great category page to get people to the site on a given KW and then make it easy to then let them browse your inventory. You can then use all the videos/product pages themselves to focus on the long tail searches. You need to work on differentiating the videos.  They need descriptions and more information around them.  I can see the differences in the videos by looking at them, but Google will not due to the lack of text.  Outsource some writers to work all of this up and it should not only be good for Google, but for users.  All of the detailed descriptions around the videos would help for those longer tail searches and you could end up with more search volume long term.  I help run a site where we have "contributor submitted content" as a part of information about their products.  The stuff we got submitted sucked.  Poorly written, typos, not helpful, etc. We hired some contract writers on the cheap and they cranked through stuff and the site is doing much better for having clean up to date content.   I know you are saying, "That is crazy" but it is just the thing that will also differentiate your content from others and ultimately gain more customers (IMHO). My best advice is to read everything that Adam Audette has ever written.  I kid you not.  He gets into details around pagination and structure for exactly the type of questions you have. This article should nail it right on the head for you http://www.rimmkaufman.com/blog/site-search-dynamic-content-and-seo/01032013/ An oldie but a a goodie http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2097061/SEO-Techniques-for-Large-Sites-How-to-Maximize-Product-Visibility-in-Organic-Search Cheers!

@TheCraig - I don't have an answer for you, but I have a few thoughts I wanted to throw out there. My concern about the AJAX links is it might be considered hiding content/deceptive behavior to the Google bot (but again, I don't know what the specific implementation is). Idea 1 of 2: Is there any way you can use category pages? So I was recently reading a well-recommended book, "SEO Secrets" by Danny Dover, and I came upon this interesting analogy describing the site architecture. I'll copy from another site's description of his analogy: "One of my favorite analogies for a good site architecture I first heard from former Mozzer Danny Dover. Think of your website like an ant hill. The opening of the ant hill is your homepage. Each link is like a tunnel connecting various web page chambers. You want each of the chambers to be easily accessed from the top of the ant hill. That means you want to organize your website in a way that allows easy navigation from your home page all the way down to the deepest chamber of your site." -- Gyi Tsakalakis on Attorney Sync, link Could you simplify your website into base categories that would make business sense? I understand the predicament you're in. By conforming to SEO (by removing links from the dropdowns), you may be killing usability for the user and thus conversions. Idea 2 of 2: If the question is important enough, why not bring on Danny Dover as a consultant directly to answer the question? He seemed like site architecture was a big deal to him. Take a look at the first few chapters of his book: "The Importance of Good Site Architecture" (Chapter 2). He seemed to emphasize the topic through his book. Then this is my idea: if it makes sense to do so (budget-wise), see if you can take him on for a few hours of his consulting time in order for you to explain your problem, and get a response. You have a very specific question (thus relatively straightforward to pick up and answer), and it might be fitting for a brief conversation. The AJAX'ing is speculation (b/c no one actually knows how Google's inner workings). Why not get speculation and judgment from someone who really knows his stuff, rather than speculating with a bunch of strangers online? It's a business expense to get the best judgment on what sounds like an important restructure!

considering this thread has only 36 views I think you should go ahead a post on youmoz, as I think its deservers more exposure ( maybe added pieter point and your warning about not to blindly follow removem)

Hi Christy, Thanks for responding!  Actually I did check out that list, but no one really jumped out at me as having specific expertise related to this area + available for just a bit of hourly consulting so we can do the work in house versus a big time contract or a few weeks of analysis, etc. etc. I'll take another look though. Thanks! Craig

If Google has said to look at their list then I would dig deep into that list.  It could be something other than a overly optimized anchor.  Check out the domains, pages links are placed.... are they selling links or up to something sketchy?

Thanks again for the answers! Yeah, totally getting you on the Search within search issue.  Wish we had known about that a couple of years ago.  Did an analytics check and most of our non-home page traffic is coming from Search Results in serps.  According to inurl, we have about 200,000 indexed SearchResult pages and based on some data I pulled up, they are our highest traffic non-home page pages, but also the least converting. I think 301 re-directs on these would be rather tricky.  I mean, if someone does a search on our site, they should get the search results page showing them several options, not be shot directly to a single product which might not be the one they need. It would be rather confusing for our regular customers as well. But I agree we need to do something here, because conversely, our product pages, while getting the least traffic are the highest converters. My only thought is that we would need to: 1.  Find a list of all of the indexed Search Result pages, or at least the ones that have been hit over the last year or so.  What would be the best way to do that?  Screaming Frog?  Analytics? 2.  Create a script that analyzes these for the keywords used in them and find a suitable item to re-direct to based on the keyword extracted. 3.  301 re-direct them. 4.  Change our current search results urls to include something that would not be included in these original pages so separate them from the old pages that are now being re-directed so that current searchers don't get re-directed as well. 5.  Set the search results pages to no - index.  Is that the best way to handle that?  If we did robots.txt, then we would be breaking the link flow of the site wouldn't we?  Don't we need the bots to crawl the search pages to lead to the product pages, or is the sitemap all that is needed? Thanks for the time and answers! Craig

sure or e-mail me davec@evolvecreativegroup.com

Craig That's a great example and I agree with you, you are on the right track. Think about your competition. They would also have the similar kinds of links. So you have those low quality, but natural links should be totally okay. With the nature of the web, nobody can control who links to them. Think what kinds of links Google, Yahoo or Amazon or Microsoft might be getting all day long. I would only concentrate on the actual links that are problem, should out manipulation, clearly blog posts, guest posts, reviews which were done from crappier sites, spam blogs. I hope this helps.

I would do both #1 and #2. If you can contact them and ask them to take the content and links down I would do that as well, documenting the request for future use in the DMCA complaint or in a disavow link request in GWT - if needed.

Ilcho, It sounds like you probably have a technical issue which is preventing your content from being indexed. I'm afraid I can't really offer more advice on this point, other to suggest paying a specialist to take a look into your specific situation. Thanks, Phil.

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