Questions
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Site Category structure detrimental to SEO?
Search engines tend to reward sites that have more comprehensive pages, so I tend to think these category pages are detrimental. Besides creating too many pages with very little content, they're all competing amongst themselves and probably appear as duplicate content - there's likely to be more HTML for your header and footer on the page than actual content. From a user experience, I'd also personally get frustrated clicking through that many times to get to what I want only to find there are so few products in that category. Or if I hopped straight there from a Google search, onto a page with so few products, I'd be likely not to stick around long. I'd rather see more and narrow it down myself. I would suggest doing one of two things: A - Filter dynamically. Instead of having all these as permanent pages, have the TV category as the last permanent page, and use checkboxes to filter down. That way you're going to a dynamic URL, not a static one. So basically, your customers get the benefit of seeing the set of products they want, but it's not a permanent "page" on your website that would get indexed. Depends heavily on what technology you're using as to how difficult this would be to change. B - If you can't filter dynamically, it might be easier for you to add meta noindex tags, or update robots.txt, to block everything below the TV category. You'll still have pages where customers can see their narrow set of products, but the meta tags or robots.txt will tell spiders not to link to pages that far down. As a side note, special characters in URLs are not a best practice, so I'd get rid of the ampersands if possible.
Technical SEO Issues | | WebElaine0 -
Is this going to be seen by google as duplicate content
I would go with rel=canonical straightaway, robots.txt is a bit harsh for that sort of thing. You could end up delisting yourself
Technical SEO Issues | | seoman100 -
How to create good SEO content for an essentially thin ecommerce site?
Great answer Andy, had already posted my previous response to Don. We do have design resources in house so this is not an issue, I guess that in the past we have been pretty tied up in grasping at straws to find a post that can relate in some way to a new product. I get the whole concept of content being king but I do also get that there is the notion that in the past we have maybe tried too had to draw parallels between an article and a product in the thin hope of that article bringing in convertable traffic. Again, a really helpful post that I will certainly look to expand upon further and will be more than happy to feedback any results. As for the tracking, thats exactly how we do track the conversions from the blog so yes please, would really appreciate any guidance in being able to track customers from the blog better. Thanks, Tim
Link Building | | timsilver0