In today’s episode, Mark and Eric discuss the findings of Eric’s study: Do eCommerce Sites Completely Mess Up Their SEO? It was a bit troubling to find out that many major eCommerce sites do not implement their SEO tags properly, at all.
Only about 25% of the pages we looked at were using their tags correctly. Hit the jump and check out the video as Eric and Mark dive deep into the results of the study. As you watch, you’ll learn how to improve the SEO of your eCommerce site, so you’ll be in better shape than some of the biggest eCommerce sites in the world!
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Full Transcript:
Eric: What are you doing?!
Mark: Tag! You’re it!
Eric: I don’t get it.
Mark: I’m doing tagging to improve the SEO on my eCommerce website.
Eric: Mark…
Mark: What?
Eric: You don’t get it, that’s not how it works. Tagging your website to improve your eCommerce site SEO is actually a very important topic. But it doesn’t actually involve tapping anybody or tagging anybody on the shoulder or on the side. It actually involves doing the right things with SEO tags on your website and its critical to your SEO. And that’s what we’re going to talk about in today’s episode of Here’s Why.
Mark: Ok Eric, now that we’ve established that site tagging is not a game, what are some of the challenges with eComm sites?
Eric: Well there are actually a lot of challenges, first of all almost any eCommerce business is extremely competitive, so that’s a big one. Another is you know what do you do with content to make your site unique? But one of the biggest challenges with eCommerce sites, is how do you implement faceted navigation in an SEO-friendly way?
Mark: So can you tell me more about faceted navigation?
Eric: Sure. So, let’s say you get to a page and, I always like to use the example of Zappos, so, it’s a shoe site so lots of shoes, so you get to a women’s shoe page, right. You can imagine that there’s many different things a user might want to do there. They might want to sort the shoes from highest price to lowest if they’re looking for something expensive, or perhaps the opposite. So that’s what we call a sort order.
They might want to filter it down and only show shoes under a hundred dollars, and not show the ones over a hundred dollars, so that’s what you call a filter. And finally there may be so many products on that page that you don’t show them all on the same page. So you might have multiple pages, and we call that, guess what, pagination. And so those are all examples of faceted navigation, and they’re things that eCommerce sites do to make themselves easier for users to deal with.
Mark: Ok, so what are the SEO solutions to the problems that causes?
Eric: You know I thought you would never ask. And, there are actually many different solutions and they’re different tags that are worth understanding what they are. So, the first is a Noindex tag. What a Noindex tag does is, what you might guess, is it tells the search engine to not include a page in the index. So if you have a page that you see as poor quality, you might use a Noindex tag so Google won’t try to index that page.
Next up is what we call a Rel=canonical tag, which is a way of saying, “hey, I’m actually just like a copy, or a partial copy of another page. So here’s my page that I’ve put a Rel=canonical tag on, and I point it to another page here, which I consider the master copy. And I’m telling Google, for ranking purposes, and link gathering, and you know putting in the search results, ignore me, send all my credit over to this, master page. And then the last one are prev/next tags. Which is what you use in the case of pagination, where basically one page one of a sequence of pages (let’s make that page one) you send a tag saying, put a tag saying that the next page is here (that’s page two) and one page two, you have a tag that points back to page 1 and says here’s the previous page, and a tag that points forward to page three, says here’s the next page. All these things help search engines understand what you’re doing with your faceted navigation.
Mark: Well okay Eric, you did a study, in which you looked at major eCommerce sites, to see if they were implementing the things you just shared with us correctly. What did you find? Can you share some of the stats from that?
Eric: It was a nightmare. I’ll tell you that we know of two major eCommerce sites that implement Rel=canonical instructions from their, all their faceted navigation pages, to the home pages of their sites. Which is basically telling Google to send all that, link value and SEO value, to the home page of the site, and that’s just really bad. The relevance and everything, it’s just horrible SEO, don’t do that.
But, even at a much simpler level, or perhaps a more complicated level, twenty-five percent of the sites, the pages that we looked at are using these SEO tags, that relate to faceted navigation, in a way that conflicts with one another. So they might Noindex a page and have a Rel=canonical instruction on it as well, and those two instructions are different instructions that the search engine has to figure out which one to do with. And then, more broadly, fifty percent, approximately of all the URLs we looked at, were actually using the tags either incorrectly, like in the wrong place, or, not using them when they should be using them. So by the time you’re done, about a quarter, to thirty-five percent of the pages, are actually using these tags in the right way. Just to explain what I said a little more clearly here, the numbers I gave you added up to more than a hundred percent, and that’s because the conflicting, plus the improper use are, you know, overlapping, but at the end of the say only about thirty-five percent of the pages we looked at were using the tags properly.
Mark: Wow, those are amazing statistics, and you can go and see that full study. You’ll get some helpful tips there as well that will help you to evaluate if your site has these problems, and how you might be able to repair them. And if you want to say thank you, the best way you can do that is share this video, and share that study with your friends.
Hi Mark and Eric,
I enjoy your Here’s Why series.
My question is this: when a page is sorted and there a few prev next tags created across a number of pages, do you implement the rel=canonical on all the pages or just the first one?
I would be curious to know which platforms had the incorrect markup. Additionally, some examples of how much better the search engine presence was with the 35% of sites that spent the time to do this correctly, as this will prove its worth.
A wonderful video, with excellent data and huge technological methods that illuminate this fabulous portal of * E Commerce* Thank you for this high definitions, which are full of standards and visions.
Hi Steve – if you have rel prev/next tags, there is no need for a rel canonical on the pages at all. The prev/next tags should take care of it. The canonical tag creates a conflict!
Hi Greg – all of these sites had highly custom configurations, but we didn’t get down to the level of what platforms they were running on. In some cases that’s a bit hard to figure out! We also did not get to measuring the SEO robustness of the sites, as this has many other factors in the mix as well. Ideally what we would be able to do is take one site that has the tags wrong, fix it, and then see how much the SEO improves. But, we don’t have the opportunity to do that with these particular sites.