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Hi Kalena

Could you please tell me if there are any special seo rules to keep in mind when developing or commissioning an ecommerce site?

Thanks
Natalie

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Hi Natalie

It’s hard to answer that question because every ecommerce site is different and presents its own challenges.

For example, if it is a large e-commerce site, it may be database driven, which means that product pages may contain session ids or multiple parameters that might confuse search engines. That would require a server-side solution of some kind.

It might offer thousands of products, meaning keyword research is a huge job and optimizing individual pages is extremely time consuming. That might require a script to integrate a meta tag / title tag template on every page.

It might be in a very competitive industry, meaning SEO of pages may not have much of an impact unless the site is hugely popular with very strong Google PR and backlinks.

I would say the most important thing you can do before SEOing an ecommerce site is RESEARCH. Your SEO Requirements Document will be crucial here, as will a very good dig into the site and the client company. To learn more about what should be included in your SEO Requirements Document, see my article: Before Launching Your SEO Campaign.

Learn as much as you can about the company, their customers, their goals and their target markets before you start any SEO activity.

Hi Kalena

Is it absolutely necessary to remove numeric parameters from a url such as: www.site.com/keyword/category213.html to ensure the page is indexed and if so, why?

Thank you
Lana

Hi Lana

The URL you provided doesn’t contain any parameters. It’s a flat HTML file so search engines shouldn’t have any problems indexing it.

It’s URLs that contain “query strings” that generally contain parameters or variables. For example:

www.site.com/product.asp?productid=2

The question mark indicates the page is dynamic and therefore requires some type of server computation to display. The page URL above contains only one parameter (productid).

See more about how Google defines dynamic vs static URLs.

These days, most search engines can index pages that contain a single parameter. It is generally when multiple parameters are used in page URLs that search engine indexing problems occur.

As Google says in their Design and Content Guidelines:

“If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few”.

Multiple parameters are often needed for large sites with multiple page templates and dynamically generated content for each section of each page. Multiple parameters are separated via an ampersand (&), for example:

www.site.com/product.asp?productid=2&producttype=large

The URL above is instructing the template for the page product.asp to query the database and load the page content for product id number 2 AND specifically the data for the large version of this product whenever anyone accesses this web page.

This type of URL is more difficult for a search engine to index because they can’t identify what the multiple parameters mean or whether the URL is a unique page.

So in this case the webmaster has the option to re-write the URLs at the server level to remove the parameters or else block search robots from indexing URLs containing multiple parameters.

But if you’re in doubt, I wouldn’t worry too much about your dynamic URLs. Google and the other search engines are pretty good at parsing and determining what parameters to ignore.

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Dear Kalena…

I’m working on a CFM database driven site and Google thinks we have hundreds of duplicate title tags and descriptions because pages on the site can be accessed using the normal page # and/or the page # plus navigation query strings.

Example: (these 3 urls all go to the same page and Google is logging them as 3 different pages in my Google Webmaster View)

1) body.cfm?id=19‎

2) body.cfm?id=19&oTopID=19‎‎

3) body.cfm?id=19&oTopId=62‎‎

To avoid a duplicate content penalty I cleaned up my sitemap.xml to only include the page # with no query strings. (Example = body.cfm?id=19‎) In my robots.txt file I’ve also added the disallow code to block any file with ‘TopId’ in the url. I’m hoping this will help…have you experienced this type of problem before?

Thanks! Mitch

Dear Mitch,

Your question was the source of some debate over here, so thanks for bringing it up! There is a question as to whether Google will actually index pages with session ID’s, and the general thinking is no, so you may be in the clear.

You seem to be handling the problem of duplicate content with database driven sites well, however. It’s best to pick one of the URL’s to include in your site map. You can also be sure NOT to link to any of these pages with duplicate content, from within your site. If you do need to link to these pages, be sure to use “no follow” tags on your link.

Best of luck, Nick Loeser

TheSmallMerchant.com