Due to the large number of pages affected, ecommerce sites can see striking SEO improvements when errors on these pages are corrected. Let's talk about what you need to do to avoid errors on your ecommerce site, starting with some tools and then walking you through some processes.
Monitoring and exploration tools
Monitoring and exploration tools are needed to identify technical SEO errors. I consider the following tools essential:
- ScreamingFrog : This is hands down one of the best SEO spiders available for most uses. You will need this, or something very similar, to handle most of the errors that we will discuss in this post.
- Google Search Console : make sure you have created an account for your domain herebecause it will notify you of errors that crawlers may not necessarily be able to find.
- Google Analytics : Regularly check your analytics for unexpected drops in organic search traffic, as they may point out errors that you might not find otherwise.
I also recommend using these tools to check for various SEO issues:
404 (missing pages)
Missing pages hurt the user experience for obvious reasons, but they also hurt your SEO. Links that point to 404 pages lose their authority.
To identify 404 pages, start by running a site crawl in ScreamingFrog. When the exploration is complete, navigate to "Response Codes " and then select "Client Error (4xx) " from the "Filter " drop-down menu.
Now export the list for later.
These are your 404 errorshigh priority because there are missing pages that links to other pages on your own site.
For each page, identify if there is a suitable replacement. If so, you will need to perform a find-and-replace operation on your site to replace all references on page 404 with the appropriate replacement.
If there are no suitable replacements, you will need to remove the links to the page so that there are no more broken links.
Additionally, you will need to configure 301 redirects from missing pages to their replacements.
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Don't just set up 301 redirects without updating the links . Links that pass through 301 redirects lose some of the SEO authority due to Google's damping factor, and the redirects take a toll on your servers.
Next, you'll need to identify your pages 404 of "lower priority ". These are missing pages that you are not linking to from your own pages, but to which other sites are linked. This may be the result of old pages that you have deleted, or heThe referring sites may have used the wrong URL.
You can find them in the Google Search Console by going to "Explorer " followed by "Crawl errors " in the left navigation pane:
Choose "Not Found " and export your 404s.
Delete it duplicate the 404s you have already addressed from ScreamingFrog. Now identify if any of them have a suitable replacement. If so, set up a redirect 301 to redirect users to the correct page.
Do not just configure an all-enclosing rule to redirect all visits to missing pages so that they are directed to home page. This is considered a soft 404. Google doesn't like them, and they are the subject of our next section.
Soft 404
A soft 404 is a missing page that does not appear as a 404 on Google. Google putsexplicitly warn against soft 404s, which come in two forms:
- "Page not found" pages that look like 404s to users, but return a success and are indexable by search engines.
- 301 or 302 redirect to unrelated pages, like the home page. A redirect is meant to redirect users to the new location on a page, not to an off topic page that will disappoint them.
Too much of either one would hurt your authority with the search engines.
You can find 404 software in Google's Search Console , also in the "Crawl errors " section.
To resolve soft 404 you can:
- Remove a site wide redirect policy that redirects all visits to missing pages to the home page 'accueil
- Make sure your missing pages are returning correctment the 404 status codes.
- Set up a page-specific redirect if a suitable replacement is available.
- Reinstall the page so that it is no longer missing. If you don't know what was previously at the URL, you can use the Wayback Machine to see what was on the page, assuming it was crawled.
- Allow the page to return a 404 status code if there are no suitable replacements, but make sure that you don't link to the page on your own site.
Don't be greedy with your redirects in an effort to capture PageRank, or you'll send a message to search results to treat your 301 pages as 404s.
Redirects
Before you tackle anything else, you want to make sure that your site doesn't have any redirect chains or loops. These are a series of redirects, where a redirect leads to autre, etc. This bleeds the PageRank of Google's damping factor and creates server load. Redirection loops make pages inaccessible.
Directly replace redirect strings with redirects from the moved page to the new location.
Once you have resolved this issue, use ScreamingFrog to identify your 301 and 302 redirects.
Process your 302 redirects first, as these are supposed to be temporary. If any of them are really permanent, they should be replaced with 301 redirects so that the redirected page does not remain not in the index. Checking your 302 can also serve as a reminder to remove temporary redirects and restore forgotten pages.
After handling your 302, the next step is to delete all links to redirected pages on your site and replace them with links to the correct location. There are very few circumstances in which you would likeBe sure to link to a redirected page, as PageRank is lost during the redirect and server load is created. Use a find and replace operation to do this.
C anonicalization
Canonicalization is a method of dealing with duplicate pages, which are very common for e-commerce sites. Canonicalization tells search engines which version of the page to treat as the legitimate version. We've covered this in detail in our e-commerce SEO guide here , but here are some guiding principles:
- Use canonicalization to process URL variables that re-sort or filter content without changing it otherwise.
- Canonicalize all pages that are duplicated because they are listed in multiple categories.
- All paginated content must be canonized as a full, non-paginated version.
- Personalized pages according to theuser must be canonized to a non-personalized version.
To identify pages that may need canonicalization, use ScreamingFrog to identify duplicate title tags :
Very often, but not always, the same page is duplicated.
No indexing
Many e-commerce Sites often have thousands of pages or more, and quite a few of them can be of very poor quality or content. Many can be very similar to each other without being pure duplicates. Many may present a manufacturer's copy that is identical to what can be found on other e-commerce sites.
In some cases it is therefore a good idea to noindex some of your pages. Non-indexing tells search engines to remove the page from search results. The noindex tag is therefore a very dangerous toy to play, and it isIt's important not to overdo it.
Here are some pages that should definitely be unindexed:
- Any admin or membership area
- Any part of the payment system
- "Thank you" or payment confirmation on the pages
- Internal search results
Some disclaimers:
- Never use "nofollow" on your own links or content. Always use . The "nofollow" tag tells search engines to throw away your PageRank. It is never a good tag to use on your own content.
- Do not canonize or index a page. Google has warned explicitly against this. In the worst case, this will not index your canonical page, even if the noindex tag is only on duplicates. More likely it will treat the canonical tag as an error, but that means any authority will goleft between duplicates will be lost.
HTML Compliance
We mentioned earlier that you need to run the W3C validator on your homepage and template pages to make sure you don't have serious html errors. While html errors are common and Google is pretty good at dealing with them, it's best to clean up errors to send the message as clearly as possible to search engines.
Use batch validation to check more pages.
Schema.org
Schema is a must have for ecommerce sites because it allows you to feed search engines with useful metadata about your products, such asUser ratings and prices, which can lead to rich results with search engines offering star ratings and other great features.
Check out Google's rich results documentation for products and include the appropriate schema to do so function. This schema code generator i is useful for easily assembling code for your models and you can test if your pages correctly support rich results using Google 's own tool here .
Concludedion
Technical SEO is important in any industry, but due to the massive size of eCommerce sites it is even more relevant to retailers. Keep your mistakes under control and your natural search traffic numbers will thank you.
Manish Dudharejia is the president and co-founder of E2M Solutions Inc , a San Diego-based digital agency specializing in website design and Development and e-commerce SEO. Follow him on Twitter .
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