How many product subcategories are ok?
-
Let's say I have a sea glass ankle bracelet. On my site, my main keyword is "Sea Glass Jewelry" and have ranked relatively well for this, but this main page has over 200 products in it. I thought that if the URL has the keywords in it, it would be beneficial. I also have a section for all my bracelets, so it would be there and then, a more specific ankle bracelets category. So, technically, an ankle bracelet will show up 3x.
Sea Glass Jewelry (all products go here)
Bracelets (all bracelets go here)
Ankle Bracelets (only ankle bracelets)
The URL is only attached to the main category so to speak. If you click the ankle bracelets category, the url will still revert back to the original main category: seaglassjewelry/sterlinganklebracelet so I don't believe there is duplicate content.
I have had my domain for years and it has ranked well until someone hacked into my site 2 years back. I have never been able to recover from this loss. Since then, I have tried to optimize my site, but nothing seems to be working and I just want to make sure that I am not hurting my ranking by doing this.
Can someone confirm this is the best way to do it or make a suggestion? Thank you.
-
2 years back....that's going to be right in the middle of a lot of Google algo changes, both Panda and Penguin. It might be just a coincidence that your traffic drop was around when the hacking happened.
Have you done a backlink analysis? It could be that the hackers also planted a ton of crappy links in the hopes of short-term getting your site to rank well for whatever they're trying to inject into your site and sell.
Sounds like you're doing the right thing with the URLs though. To do a double-check on the duplicate content side, you could run Screaming Frog against it, and check for duplicate page titles and meta descriptions. If your pages are getting spit out with multiple URLs, you'll see them all show up with duplicates.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is the meta title written only for google (try to stuff in as many keywords as possible) or is there a user experience aspect as well?
Is the meta title written only for google (try to stuff in as many keywords as possible) or is there a user experience aspect as well?
On-Page Optimization | | whiteonlySEO0 -
Should I add PDF manuals to my product pages?
Hello. A lot of the products I sell on my e-commerce site are very technical. I decided to add PDF data sheets, manuals etc on each of the product pages to improve the customer experience. Now I am not sure if it was the best thing to do. I have noticed a couple of times that the PDF is out ranking the product page in the SERP. For a few products, the PDF ranks but the product page doesn't. Anyone got any ideas?
On-Page Optimization | | DavidLenehan0 -
Hi can anyone help me with navigating through my business admin page? having a little trouble. Many Thanks
It looks like this... The person that created it has put the term "Hand painted ceramics from spain - inspired ceramica" on every page title and i cant find where it is to delete it. If anyone can help that will be a real help. Many Thanks, Robbie oOU4YDY
On-Page Optimization | | allenr120 -
To many links hurting me even though they are helping users
I have a scrabble based site where I function as a anagram solver, scrabble dictionary look up and tons of different word lists. In each of these word lists I link every word to my scrabble dictionary. This has caused Google to index 10018 pages total for my site and over 300 of them have well over 100 links. Many of them contain over 1000 links. I know Google's and SEOMOZ stance that anything over 100 will hurt me. I have always seen the warnings in my dashboard warning me of this but I have simply ignored it. I have posted on this Q and A that I have this issue, but IMO having these links benefit the users in the aspect that they don't have to worry about coping the text and putting it in the search box, they can simply click the link. Some have said if it helps the users then I am good, others have said opposite. I am thinking about removing these links from all these word lists to reduce the links per page. My questions are these. 1. If I remove the links from my page could this possible help me? No harm in trying it out so this is an easy question 2. If I remove the links then I will have over 9000 pages that are indexed with Google that no longer have a link pointing to them, except for the aspect that they are indexed with Google still. Is it going to hurt me if I remove these links and Google no longer sees them linked from my site or anywhere else?
On-Page Optimization | | cbielich0 -
Do we have too many links in our footer?
Hi guys, we have 41 links on our holiday(vacation) rental website, this seems too many when looking at best practice. 24 of these are links to community pages while 8 link to activities pages. The community and activity pages are also accessible from links on the top menu so they are not strictly necessary but do get 10% of site clickthroughs according to Google in-page analytics. I therefore do not want to remove the links if there is no good evidence that google will penalize us for this. What do you think would be best for our site? Thanks, John Tulley. footer.jpg
On-Page Optimization | | JohnTulley0 -
Too many links
Hello, sorry question 2! I run the report it says we have 120 links roughly per page. I know this is bad however I have question about an oscommerce site. I identified some links that can be deleted for example Product picture is a link then the title and then its says details (so I can delete the details and that should save about 15 links) Now I really can only delete the breadcrumb for example car>>ford>>spareparts>>engine If I delete the breadcrumb I would lose four links would you say thats a good idea? or leave the breadcrumb due to the seo benefits. Many thanks for your help. Sonja
On-Page Optimization | | reallyitsme0 -
Product merchandising category creation
I work on a site selling clothing, and we break up our clothing into categories of types of clothing. Right now in my accessories, I have an other category, which cover the miscellaneous items that there aren't enough to warrant their own categories. I was curious what people thought about further breakdowns of this category. Do I create a category that only has one item in it? Is there a certain threshold of number of items which should signal that these items need their own categories or length of time they're expected to be available to buy? Right now, I'm not targeting the one-off items for SEO purposes because we tend not to carry them from season to season or continue with them long enough to be the best use of my SEO time.
On-Page Optimization | | kennyrowe0 -
How unique do product descriptions need to be?
I'm rewriting approximately 10,000 product descriptions, but for feasability it's useful to sometimes reuse some of the phrases that are there (and on other websites as they come straight from the manufacturer -eg. key features), how unique does the content have to be - are we talking 100%, 75%, 50% for it to be effective in google? Same question goes for the product title! Many thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | ewanr0