Google Updates, Technical and On-Page SEO for Ecommerce · 2018-08-17 · Google Updates, Technical...

@SukhSingh84 sukh@anicca.co.uk#ecommercial15

Google Updates, Technical and On-Page SEO for Ecommerce

By Sukh Singh

Head of Tech SEO at @AniccaDigital

Google Updates relevant to Ecommerce Sites

@SukhSingh84 sukh@anicca.co.uk#ecommercial15Google Panda Update

Google Panda

• Last update: Panda 4.2” - July 17, 2015

•Reduce / drop rankings for thin, irrelevant and duplicate content

•Update is still rolling out• Further info: http://www.thesempost.com/google-panda-update-

everything-we-know-about-panda-4-2/

Panda issues relevant to ecommerce sites

• Thin content on category / product pages

• Same products in multiple categories

•Auto generated titles and meta descriptions

•URL parameters

• External duplicates on affiliate / 3rd party shops, or cheeky copycat sites

• Unique insight from Ex Google employee on all updates -https://en.pedrodias.net/google/google-penalties

@SukhSingh84 sukh@anicca.co.uk#ecommercial15Google Penguin Update

Google Penguin

• Last update: Penguin 3.0 October 17, 2014

•Moving to real-time refresh / updates• http://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-the-real-time-penguin-algorithm-is-

coming-soon-232093

•Affects web spam in general, as well as low quality links

Penguin issues relevant to ecommerce sites

• Low quality blogger outreach

• Site wide links (inexperienced webmasters may create these)

• Links from suppliers, 3rd party shops, affiliates

• Remove spam links + disavow (skip to disavow?)

• In the US you have to declare if a blog post is incentivised (Federal Trade Commission)

• Will this affect link building, will Google class more links as bad, and will this come to UK?

• https://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/disclosures-for-bloggers-and-brands/

Google Mobile

Friendly Update

Mobile Friendly Update - April 21st 2015

•Only update Google warned us about well in advance

• Each page evaluated (not collective site)

•Real-time algorithm

•Responsive, mobile-friendly pages = “mobile friendly” tag in SERPs and slight ranking boost

•Mobile apps = ranking boost

•Unfriendly pages = no ranking boost

Mobile friendly issues relevant to ecommerce

•Often difficult / expensive to convert large sites to responsive – so often have separate .mobi or m.site• Separate mobile sites will rank, responsive design easier

to manage / get indexed

•Migrate all good desktop usability features to mobile

• Keep in mind: mobile sites have lower conversion rates vs tablet and desktop• http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/75772-Mobile-Commerce-vs-Desktop-7-Differences

• Is page load speed related to mobile update?

Common On-Page and Technical Issues

Internal Duplicate Content

URL Parameters

URL Parameters causing duplicates

?colour=green&size=9&brand=BR_NN&price=5000-7500&order=PRICE+ASCENDING

Parameter effect: Narrowing

Parameter effect: Sorting

Tips for URL Parameters• Keep site structure simple; only essential “narrowing” and “sorting” options

•Add canonical tags to product pages with parameters (parameter variations pointing to their non-parameter versions)

•Disallow parameters that you don’t want to index (will help optimise crawl budget too)

•Configure your parameters in Google Webmaster Tools – tell Google how to handle them• https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/crawl-url-parameters

Pagination causing duplicates

Tips for Pagination• Set a pagination parameter in Google Webmaster Tools

• Add pagination tags to the head of the code• http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/canonicalization-pagination-101-for-e-

commerce-websites.html

• Can also add canonical tags to paginated pages, pointing to “view-all” or “main-results-page”• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en

• Use AJAX to display all products on one page• Guide https://moz.com/blog/how-to-allow-google-to-crawl-ajax-

content• For developers – Google can now crawl Ajax without setting URLs e.g.

“#!page-name” http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/deprecating-our-ajax-crawling-scheme.html

Crawl Budget and Indexation

• Is the amount of time / pages a search engine can crawl your site in one session.• High authority pages = get crawled more regularly

• Duplicate, 404 / 500 error pages use up crawl budget time, decrease site trust and reduce frequency of site crawls

•We need most important pages crawled first

•Disallow redundant pages (e.g. admin areas), parameter (e.g. sorting, narrowing, sessions id’s) and other irrelevant pages in robots file

Optimise your site for crawling and indexingCrawl budget tips

• Resolve 400 / 500 crawl errors

• No-index parameters

• Remove crawl delay settings

• Consolidate your content!

• Raise page authority for lower scoring pages (use Ahrefs)https://www.deepcrawl.com

Tools for issues discussedLink monitoring / removals

• https://ahrefs.com (monitor new/removed links)

• http://www.linkdetox.com (dissect and monitor spam links)

• https://www.rmoov.com (automate link removal requests)

• https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main - (disavow tool)

Diagnose mobile issues with:

• https://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ (Mobile friendly test)

• https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-usability (Mobile usability section in Webmaster Tools)

Diagnose crawl issues with:

• https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools

• https://www.deepcrawl.com/

• www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider

• https://moz.com/home (crawl diagnostics)

• https://ahrefs.com/ (check high/low authority pages and optimise for better indexation)

Lets chat more on the SEO Roundtable: 3:30-4pm Room B

• Product and category optimisation

• Optimise meta, title tags and add Schema for Google results pages

• Optimise crawl budget and indexation

• Optimise site speed

• Apply secure user journey site-wide (HTTPS)

• Optimising robots.txt file (no index process/private pages)

• Ensure hosting server has anti-hacking security

• International SEO considerations

• Local SEO (for “clicks and mortar”)

Other On-Page and Technical Issues I didn't have time to

discuss

Site speed in relation to ecommerce sites

•A fast page load speed will gain you a positive SEO signal

• 1-2 Seconds is average good speed, but hard for ecommerce sites

• There are common issue on CMS platforms like Magento, Drupal and Wordpress

•Common causes across all ecommerce sites:• Hi-res / uncompressed images• Uncompressed script files (CSS / JavaScript)• Slow server• Browser caching not used• Too many unnecessary redirects

Site speed tips (1/2)• Check current speeds and start working through issues:

• https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/• http://tools.pingdom.com/

• Use plugins or manually compress image file sizes while retaining quality• http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/compress-jpeg-png-images.html• https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/

• Compress your CSS and JavaScript (user server or client-side tools)• http://cssminifier.com/• http://jscompress.com/

• Evaluate your hosting server• Ask your hosting company to determine: peak user load requirements (CPU usage,

RAM, hard drive space) and ask to alert you when this is exceeded – seek an upgrade / new provider if exceeded often

• Enable browser caching • Forces browsers to cache page elements like header images so that the next time a

page is visited they are loaded from a file rather than downloaded• https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/LeverageBrowserCaching?hl=en

• Remove non-essential redirects

Site speed tips (2/2)• Consider content delivery networks (CDN’s)

• A content delivery network is a network of servers based in multiple locations – depending on the user’s proximity to the server, the website request will be responded to by the closest server – preventing too many server hops, thus reducing load time

• Popular CDN providers:

• http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/

• https://www.maxcdn.com/features/

ContentandProductOptimisation

Content and product optimisation

• Products are the main attraction, but content helps them get indexed, ranked and purchased

• Content: Text, images, videos; on category, product and blog pages

• We find that top level pages do better with 250 –500 words

• Sub category / product pages 150 – 200 words

Top Level PagesHome / Top Categories

Sub Categories / Product Pages

This is some text rather than writing Lorem ipsum something bla bla bla. This is some text rather than writing Lorem ipsum something blabla bla.

This is some text rather than writing Lorem ipsum something bla bla bla.

Where to fit this text?

Top Level PagesHome / Top Categories

This is some text rather than writing Lorem ipsum something bla bla bla. This is some text rather than writing Lorem ipsum something bla bla bla.

This is some text rather than writing Lorem ipsum something bla bla bla.

Introduction to the category.. fine here’s the products!

Product Pages

Top level pages

• Products take priority above the fold!

• Optimised “H1” heading

• Short text at the top and / or text below the products

Product pages

• Short text next to image with “read more” link

• More product details, specs, reviews at the bottom

Optimise for Search engine results pages (SERPs)

• Page title - max 59 characters, informative and punchy

• Meta description - max 159 characters, more engaging info, call to action

• Use structured data - display prices, stock level, review stars

CLICK ME!

Use structured data for ecommerceAggregate reviews and stock availability Local business

Structured data enables Google to display detailed product info as rich snippets in search, output voice answers and snippets in Google Maps.

Tips to add structured data?

• Use plugins where possible• https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-social-seo-booster/

• http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/schema-org.html

• Add code manually onto site• With microdata - https://schema.org/Product ,

https://developers.google.com/structured-data/rich-snippets/products

• Use JSON-LD - https://builtvisible.com/micro-data-schema-org-guide-generating-rich-snippets/

• Instruct Google to read products as structured data • https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper

Microdata schema example

• Will work, but time consuming to add

• Have to ensure CSS/HTML accommodates code

builtvisible.com

JSON-LD schema example• Much easier to add, no

messing with CSS/HTML

• However, make sure the data you are marking up with JSON-LD matches what the user sees on the page – anything extra will be seen as manipulating the search results as Google needs to see exactly what users see – nothing more or less

builtvisible.com

Product Page: Red Cat Jumper

Products within multiple categories

www.catlady.co.uk/cats/red.php

www.catllady.co.uk/jumpers/red.php

www.catlady.co.uk/brands/smelly-

cat/red.php

Different routes (URLs) to same physical page classed

as duplicate pagesThis is some text rather than writing Lorem ipsum something bla bla bla.

On variation pages use a canonical tag pointing to an elected page: <link rel="canonical“ href="http://www.catllady.co.uk/jumpers/red.php">

Tips for products within multiple categories

• Evaluate site structure and reduce categories to essentials (more helpful for new site builds)

• If want duplicate “routes” indexed but want to rank main product route only - apply canonical tags

• If you want to rank variations, re-write the content

• If there are routes you don’t need users or google to see at all – 301 redirect them to main chosen route

Duplication for international sites

Duplication for international sitesSame-language duplication is a common issue

• Duplication within same site, sub-folders can look like: • www.catsinternational.com/en-uk

• www.catsinternational.com/en-us

• www.catsinternational.com/en-africa

• Across multiple sites this can look like:• www.catsinternational.co.uk

• www.catsinternational.com

• www.catsinternational.africa

• This can get messy: same language duplication vs general duplication (product/service text, URL parameters, pagination etc)

Tips for international sub-folders / multi-sites• Target each page to its region with “rel="alternate" hreflang” tags

• So Google can figure out which pages to display in which Google version, and to reduce risk of cannibalisation across regional Google versions

• Check if these signals have been acknowledged by going into ”International Targeting” within Google Webmaster Tools

• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en• http://searchengineland.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-multilingual-and-

multiregional-seo-157838

• Can use Canonical tags alongside hreflang tags / cross-domain canonicals too

• (additional) Set up each regional folder / site with its own webmaster tools account and set a target country for each

• If you need to rank same-language variations, re-write content (decide on English vs Native language – use analytics / local data)

Thank You!sukh@anicca.co.uk@SukhSingh84

@AniccaDigital

#ecommercial2015

Google Updates, Technical and On-Page SEO for Ecommerce · 2018-08-17 · Google Updates, Technical...

Documents

SEO for Ecommerce - Adam Audette

Advanced SEO for Ecommerce Sites - Patrick Altoft at Ecommerce Expo 2013

SEO Best Practices for eCommerce

SEO Ecommerce Pitfalls - BrightonSEO Sept2016

Ecommerce SEO Strategy- Baggout

Ecommerce - Seo Specialist

Australian eCommerce SEO Tips

Seo questions | SEO News | SEO Updates

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Strategic SEO in Action; Competition & eCommerce

eCommerce Solutions · รองรับการปรับแต่งร้านค้าแบบ SEO ใช้งานง่ายและสะดวกกว่าเดิม

Ecommerce SEO in 2012

Ecommerce SEO Masterclass

Ecommerce Seo & the Link Building Game

Ecommerce home page SEO

Proven eCommerce SEO Hacks

ClinicSEO: SEO para ecommerce

Ecommerce / Seo Specialist

eCommerce SEO