OSC & Internal Linking SEO: Let's Have a Discussion!

[discxpress]

Why have they got the same meta tags as I thought every page needed different meta tags and they are so easy to change in the BS version.

@@14steve14

 

I meant they have the same description and keywords meta tags. 

[discxpress]

@@Jack_mcs

 

All Products SEO is great with it's filtering capabilities. Is there a version for bootstrap available?

 

I have attached a screenshot of my search analytics from Google Search console over a 28 day period. I'm trying to send the love to product pages. 

 

Whatever has helped those top pages get that much link juice, I would like for the rest of my site. Of course we want the categories and product pages to appear as close to the top in the serps over the admin pages.

 

Another thought would be to make certain I have the Header Tags setup correctly. 

 

Thanks for chiming in.

[discxpress]

@@frankl

 

 

 

Not that I know of. I made my own. You can have them if you want  :)

Of course I do!

[Jack_mcs]

I am going to suggest that sites like these are incorrectly configured or are not configured at all. You can make a loose estimate of how many pages should be in the index. Add your homepage, number of category pages and total products together and that's the basic number of pages you need in the index. If you have a lot more URLs than that basic number in the index, then you could have inefficiency and possible pagerank spread.

No, that's not how the search engines work. If you have a link to product A on the home page, when they visit the home page they will follow that link and rank the product A page accordingly. Then they may follow a category link and when they see the product listed there, they will follow it and end up on the product A page again. Those are two different links and they will both be listed.

 

Someone posted some time ago that oscommerce was causing duplicate content problems because of this. That is wrong. It is perfectly fine, and expected, to have multiple links to the same page. It is true for any site.

 

It wouldn't be possible, at least not close to easy, to limit the number of links to the actual items in the shop. If you had one product, you would expect one link in the search engines for products but, in reality, there would be more, depending upon the other links in the shop.. You can't control what path the search engines will take while looking at your shop and to try to limit them to certain sections could be a catastrophe,

 

I don't understand what you mean by "inefficiency" so I can't comment on that. But as far as Page Rank, adding extra links to the pages has always counted towards PR. It doesn't count as much as one from an external site is concerned but it counts. At least it used to. With google hiding that now it is now as easy to tell. But it doesn't hurt it.

[Jack_mcs]

@@discxpress There are two problems in the image you posted. First, there is a rewritten product url without the name. Some little credit comes from having the name in the url so you should fix that. It is common in older versions of the url rewriters so you may need to update yours.

 

The search engines should not be allowed to list protected pages like login.php. I suggest you make sure you have a robots file with those listed.

[discxpress]

@@Jack_mcs

 

Where's the latest version of the url rewriter? I have the latest version of Ultimate SEO Urls installed but turned it off because it prevented XML Sitemap from completing. So that area needs attention.

 

I've now listed login.php in robots file.

 

Thanks.

 

@@discxpress There are two problems in the image you posted. First, there is a rewritten product url without the name. Some little credit comes from having the name in the url so you should fix that. It is common in older versions of the url rewriters so you may need to update yours.

 

The search engines should not be allowed to list protected pages like login.php. I suggest you make sure you have a robots file with those listed.

[Hotclutch]

No, that's not how the search engines work. If you have a link to product A on the home page, when they visit the home page they will follow that link and rank the product A page accordingly. Then they may follow a category link and when they see the product listed there, they will follow it and end up on the product A page again. Those are two different links and they will both be listed.

 

Someone posted some time ago that oscommerce was causing duplicate content problems because of this. That is wrong. It is perfectly fine, and expected, to have multiple links to the same page. It is true for any site.

 

It wouldn't be possible, at least not close to easy, to limit the number of links to the actual items in the shop. If you had one product, you would expect one link in the search engines for products but, in reality, there would be more, depending upon the other links in the shop.. You can't control what path the search engines will take while looking at your shop and to try to limit them to certain sections could be a catastrophe,

 

I don't understand what you mean by "inefficiency" so I can't comment on that. But as far as Page Rank, adding extra links to the pages has always counted towards PR. It doesn't count as much as one from an external site is concerned but it counts. At least it used to. With google hiding that now it is now as easy to tell. But it doesn't hurt it.

 

This is totally wrong...what you are describing is the exact definition of duplicate content. A page should be uniquely identified by its URL.

 

By inefficiency I simply mean URLs in the index that ought not to be there.

[Jack_mcs]

@@discxpress The latest version is in the addons section. But it has the filename definitions removed and won't work for some site. In that case, use the version before it. They are identical other than the definition changes and few other minor changes that won't affect operation.

 

@@Hotclutch Duplicate content doesn't have anything to do with the url, other than for a page to be considered duplicate content it has to have a different url. Google, as in most things, has never released a definition of what duplicate content is but the general consensus is that if two pages are less than 15% different, they may be considered duplicate. But it is more than that. The search engines are smart enough nowadays to know when a page is deliberately set as duplicate and when it is just the layout of the site. Consider googles policy for their shopping feeds for sites that sell clothes, for example, If a site sells a shirt that comes in red and blue, they want a separate url submitted for each in the feed. But the url can be to the same page, just with a different parameter, like ...com/product_a?color=red and ...com/product_a?color=blue. On that page, the color needs to show. So here the url's are to the same page and the content is identical except for one thing (probably the selected attribute). Having a canonical url will remove any doubt for them.

 

Google rarely does anything with regards to duplicate content, in my experience. When they first announced it they made it sound like if there was the slightest hint of a duplicate situation, the site would be banned. They later clarified that due to the uproar it caused. Now, a site would have to go to extremes to be punished for it.

 

There is also the case of where the pages really are legitimately duplicate. Let's say you sold car tires and one particular tire fit a Ford and a BMW. On your site, you have categories for each make of car. It is common in such a situation to add a product in one category and then duplicate it to the other and maybe make some small difference on the page, like saying "This product is for a Ford" or "This product is for a BMW". The pages would be identical except for one small word. If this were not allowed, it would hurt a lot of shops.

 

Finally, if what you say was the case then a direct link to a product and a link to that product via the product listing page would cause many duplicate content situations on all oscommerce shops since those urls would be different but to the same page.

 

Google has stated over and over again that as long as your shop is working in a legitimate manor (meaning you are not tying to fool them), such things like duplicate content, or just banning in general, would not be an issue.