Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Important keywords in product names
-
Hi!
among other we sell motorcycle clothing, which you can buy as a set (both jacket and pants) or single piece. Currently we name the products with the labeling in the beginning, e.g:
Motorcycle pants R2000, Motorcycle jacket R2000, Motorcycle kit R2000
Motorcycle pants R4000, Motorcycle jacket R4000, Motorcycle kit R4000
This is causing keyword stuffing and cannibalization in the category pages as all the product names include important keywords.
On the other hand it would be beneficial to keep the labeling in the name for search queries for the exact product.
What be your recommendations? I tend to take the labeling away.
-
Hi Tyler,
thank you for your quick reply. This is definitely great input, but yeah, my description of the problem wasn't quite clear. Sorry for that.
The issue right now is, that we have category pages with high keyword stuffing/ cannibalization. Following the example from above, our "motorcycle jackets" category page looks somewhat like this:
<a>Motorcycle jacket R2000</a>
<a>Motorcycle jacket R4000</a>
<a>Motorcycle jacket SuperCool</a>
<a>Motorcycle jacket Terminator</a>
etc.
And since the Motorcycle jacket category page shall be/ is the one ranking for keywords like "motorcycle jacket", we have a keyword cannibalization here.
On the other hand, if someone is searching for "motorcycle jacket R2000" if want to ensure the product page of the R2000 jacket is shown, not the product pages for the kit or the pants.
-
Without knowing the existing site architecture it is a little difficult to give a specific answer, but my two cents:
Are the 'like products' on the same page? For instance are...
Motorcycle pants R2000, Motorcycle jacket R2000, and Motorcycle kit R2000 on Page A
...and...
Motorcycle pants R4000, Motorcycle jacket R4000, and Motorcycle kit R4000 on Page B
...that is the image I am getting from your description.
Would it work with your site architecture to have a guide page for each category and then link to the product pages from there? The pants guide could talk about how amazing your motorcycle pants are, the relevant specs and about how wonderful your butt would look in a pair. The link could land on a product page that is a collection of all the pants you offer, it could be a link to the R2000 'set' page (where you sell all the products under one page), it could theoretically land on whatever you think is most user-friendly and would increase your ROI.
Ideally, and in my humble opinion, you would optimize your first page -however you choose to lay out the internal linking- for SEO and to show in relevant SERPs. Give some great original content; make that page have personality/establish your brand and brand persona (fun, serious, edgy, whatever); and something people would feel good about sharing with their buddies on facebook. Your awesome page on pants, for example, could be the canonical page and some appropriate usage of the 'rel=canonical' element could ensure that, if your user lands on the buy page (the one where all the size selections, etc... take place), that the linking metrics find their way to the page you want to rank, and have optimized for ranking, while the user happily shops and buys. This should avoid eating your own tail when it comes to talking about pants on subsequent pages -let's be honest, you can't sell pants without talking about pants.
I hope that this was clear and offered some sort of insight, but please take it only as a consideration which should be examined critically and with other options in mind. I am sure there are some other great ideas to be put forth and I would love to see some others post their thoughts!
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
-
Do WooCommerce product tags effect SEO?
I'm just curious if I need these product tags and if they impact in any way at all SEO? - whether that be positively or negatively. on1iRin
On-Page Optimization | | xdunningx0 -
City Name in URL structure
I have a client whose site was built when they only served one market, and they now have that city in the majority of their URLs. I'm suggesting we redo the URL structure to remove this location from the main URLs (think homepage, about, etc.) since they have now expanded to three markets. They are seeing a lot of great organic traffic in that original market but are struggling in the new ones they've added so I'm helping to optimize their site. How critical do you think that removing that location from the URL is? I know we would need to implement 301 redirects, but wanted to get thoughts on this.
On-Page Optimization | | maghanlinchpinsales0 -
Snippet showing as domain name with apostrophe, instead of page title when searching for the domain name.
Hi, We have an issue with one of our websites, with the snippet dispaying differently in Google serps when searching for the domain or the website name rather than a search term. When searching for a search term, the page title shows as expected, but when searching for the site by the domain name either with or without the tld, it shows the snippet as the domain name with an apostrophe at the end. Domain is subli.co.uk Thanks in advance for any advice!
On-Page Optimization | | K3v1n0 -
Is there any benefit to removing brand name from the title tag?
I just signed up for Moz recently, and have noticed that in my crawl errors, I have hundreds of issues with my title tag being too long. My business is selling prints for landscape/travel/nature photography, and I've built these pages dynamically to where the title tag for pages selling individual photos has the title of the photo for sale followed by a hyphen and then the brand name. The same goes for gallery pages "Gallery Name | Brand Name". Would it be worth it to shorten the title tags by removing the brand name from these pages? Or will that actually harm more than help? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | shannmg10 -
Should you have two separate pages for synonym keywords?
Suppose that you want to rank for two keyword phrases that mean the same thing but are slightly different in spelling. When should you put both keyword phrases on one page versus two pages? What are the pros and cons?
On-Page Optimization | | ProjectLabs0 -
Add content as blog post or to product pages?
Hi, We have around 40 products which we can produce plenty of in-depth and detailed "how to"-type pieces of content for. Our current plan is to produce a "How to make" style post for each as a long blog post, then link that to the product page. There's probably half a dozen or more of these kind of blog posts that we could do for each product. The reason why we planned on doing it like this is that it would give us plenty of extra pages (blog posts) on their own URL which can be indexed and rank for long tail keywords, but also that we can mention these posts in our newsletter. It'd give people a new page full of specific content that they can read instead of us having to say "Hey! We've updated our product page for X!", which seems a little pointless. Most of the products we sell don't get very many searches themselves; Most get a couple dozen and the odd few get 100-300 each, while one gets more than 2,000 per month. The products don't get many searches as it's a relatively unknown niche when it comes to details, but searches for the "categories" these products are in are very well known (Some broad terms that cover the niche get more than 30,000+ searches a month in the UK and 100,000+ world wide) [Exact].
On-Page Optimization | | azu25
Regarding the one product with more than 2,000 searches; This keyword is both the name of the product and also a name for the category page. Many of our competitors have just one of these products, whereas we're one of the first to have more than 6 variations of this product, thus the category page is acting like our other product pages and the information you would usually find on our product pages, is on the category page for just this product. I'm still leaning towards creating each piece of content as it's own blog post which links to the product pages, while the product pages link to the relevant blog posts, but i'm starting to think that it may be be better to put all the content on the product pages themselves). The only problem with this is that it cuts out on more than 200 very indepth and long blog posts (which due to the amount of content, videos and potentially dozens of high resolution images may slow down the loading of the product pages). From what I can see, here are the pros and cons: Pro (For blog posts):
1. More than 200 blog posts (potentially 1000+ words each with dozens of photos and potentially a video)..
2. More pages to crawl, index and rank..
3. More pages to post on social media..
4. Able to comment about the posts in the newsletter - Sounds more unique than "We've just updated this product page"..
5. Commenting is available on blog posts, whereas it is not on product pages..
6. So much information could slow down the loading of product pages significantly..
7. Some products are very similar (ie, the same product but "better quality" - Difficult to explain without giving the niche away, which i'd prefer not to do ATM) and this would mean the same content isn't on multiple pages.
8. By my understanding, this would be better for Google Authorship/Publishership.. Con (Against blog posts. For extended product pages):
1. Customers have all information in one place and don't have to click on a "Related Blog posts" tab..
2. More content means better ability to rank for product related keywords (All but a few receive very few searches per month, but the niche is exploding at an amazing rate at the moment)..
3. Very little chance of a blog post out-ranking the related product page for keywords.. I've run out of ideas for the 'Con' side of things, but that's why I'd like opinions from someone here if possible. I'd really appreciate any and all input, Thanks! [EDIT]:
I should add that there will be a small "How to make" style section on product pages anyway, which covers the most common step by step instructions. In the content we planned for blog posts, we'd explore the regular method in greater detail and several other methods in good detail. Our products can be "made" in several different ways which each result in a unique end result (some people may prefer it one way than another, so we want to cover every possible method), effectively meaning that there's an almost unlimited amount of content we could write.
In fact, you could probably think of the blog posts as more of "an ultimate guide to X" instead of simply "How to X"...0 -
Fewer keywords in title tag?
Hello, I have a title tag that includes three keywords and has a total of 59 characters. The third keyword is not very important. If I eliminated the third keyword, leaving the first two (for a total of 48 characters), would the ranking value of the first two keywords increase? Does including the third keyword dilute the value of the first two? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | nyc-seo0 -
My Domain Name - short vs relevant
I'm creating a website for my new web design company in Vancouver. I'm looking to target such keywords as "Web Design Vancouver", etc. I have another company with a hyphenated domain name which is terrible when I'm on the phone and my client asks me for my domain (hard to say, always spelling it out). Also I wanted to have a good snappy name for my new business so I found a 6 letter .com and matching .ca for my company. My question is: is it best to use a short domain name or is it better have my keywords in the domain name? eg. xyz.com vs xyzvancouverwebdesign.com Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | VebianWebandMobileDevelopment0