Technical SEO for Ecommerce Websites

overdose.digital // @jasonmun // #smssyd18

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Overdose Digital // Digital Commerce Agency
@jasonmun / jasonmun.com
https://overdose.digital
http://au.linkedin.com/in/jason-mun-8698a13

https://www.petstock.com.au/dog/food-1/dry-food
https://www.petstock.com.au/dog/food-1/dry-food/filter/balanced-life-b-3586
https://www.petstock.com.au/dog/food-1/dry-food/filter/balanced-life-b-3586/bonnie-b-1464
https://www.petstock.com.au/dog/food-1/dry-food/filter/balanced-life-b-3586/bonnie-b-1464/canidae-b-1482
https://www.petstock.com.au/dog/food-1/dry-food/filter/balanced-life-b-3586/bonnie-b-1464/canidae-b-1482/sort/name-a-to-z
https://www.petstock.com.au/dog/food-1/dry-food/filter/balanced-life-b-3586/bonnie-b-1464/canidae-b-1482/sort/best-selling
https://www.petstock.com.au/dog/food-1/dry-food/filter/balanced-life-b-3586/bonnie-b-1464/canidae-b-1482/sort/name-z-to-a
https://www.petstock.com.au/dog/food-1/dry-food/sort/name-z-to-a/page/2
https://www.petstock.com.au/dog/food-1/dry-food/sort/price-low/page/5
https://www.petstock.com.au/dog/food-1/dry-food/sort/best-selling/page/3
FacetedNavFiltersPagination

• 108 different faceted options = 1,170,505,728 combos
• 7 sorting/filtering options
• 8 pages of products
1,170,505,728 x 7 x 8 = 65 billion URL combinations
This is only one product category!

• NO canonical tags
• NO proper meta robots tag
• NO robots.txt blocks
• Impacts SEO performance

• Every website is allocated a set (finite) amount of crawl
budget
• Allocated based on technical capacity and popularity of
the site
• You want Google to crawl your important pages more
frequently – not crappy duplicated/thin pages
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2017/01/what-crawl-budget-means-for-googlebot.html

• Identify URL patterns for faceted navigation and filters
• Use robots.txt to control crawling
Disallow: /*/sort/*
Disallow: /*/filter/*
Disallow: /*mode=*
Disallow: /*manufacturer=*
• Use meta robots tag to control indexing
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow” />
https://www.contentkingapp.com/academy/control-crawl-indexing/

Homepage Category Sub-Category Faceted / Filtering Internal Search Result Pages
4 84 4 8
Crawl
&
Index
Crawl
&
Index
Crawl
&
Index
DO NOT
Crawl & Index
DO NOT
Crawl & Index

/collections/mens-footwear/products/vans-
vans-old-skool-mono-bumper-burgundy-white
/products/vans-vans-old-skool-mono-bumper-burgundy-white/collections/mens-footwear-lows/products/vans-vans-old-
skool-mono-bumper-burgundy-white
• Same product categorised in to multiple categories
• Unique URLs depending on click/crawl path
• Content is identical

/au/clothing/shirts/botany-downs-
shirt/005359.html?dwvar_005359_color=VIOLET
&cgid=clothing-shirts#start=3
/au/clothing/shirts/botany-downs-shirt/005359-02.html/au/clothing/shirts/botany-downs-shirt/005359.html
• One product with multiple SKU options
• Every SKU option generates a unique URL
• Content is mostly identical except for colour swatch selection

• It confuses the hell out of the bots
• No control over which version gets indexed and
displayed in SERPs
• If you are checking your SERPs in Google and notice the
message below, chances are you have some internal
duplicate content issue:
Source: Moz.com

• Using advanced Google search queries
• Cherry pick a few product pages and run these queries
site:yourdomain.com.au inurl:product-url-key
OR
site:yourdomain.com.au intitle:product name
OR
site:yourdomain.com.au “snippet of content”

GSC > Search Appearance > HTML Improvements > Duplicate Title Tags

Deepcrawl.co.uk

Screamingfrog.co.uk

Sitebulb.com

/products/vans-vans-old-skool-mono-bumper-burgundy-white
/collections/mens-footwear/products/vans-vans-old-skool-mono-
bumper-burgundy-white
/collections/mens-footwear-lows/products/vans-vans-old-skool-
mono-bumper-burgundy-white
/collections/sales/products/vans-vans-old-skool-mono-bumper-
burgundy-white
<link rel=“canonical”
href=“https://www.culturekings.com.au/products/vans-vans-old-
skool-mono-bumper-burgundy-white” />
DUPLICATE #1
DUPLICATE #2
DUPLICATE #3
CANONICAL VERSION

CANONICAL VERSION
Canonical

CANONICAL VERSION

• Common on all E-commerce websites
• Instead of showing all of your products at once, split it
across multiple pages
• Most of the time, these elements remain consistent:
Title Tag, Meta Description, H1, Text content
• Hint: Duplicates…Near Duplicates…??

• Google launched the support of pagination tags –
rel=“next” and rel=“prev” in 2011
• It indicates to Google that “a collection of pages” are
part of the same paginated series
• Strong hint to Google to consolidate indexing properties
such as links
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en

NEXT
PREV
NEXT
PREV
NEXT
PREV
/shoes.htm /shoes.htm?p=2 /shoes.htm?p=3 /shoes.htm?p=4
<link rel=”next” href=”https://site.com/shoes.htm?p=2”>
<link rel=”prev” href=”https://site.com/shoes.htm”>
<link rel=”prev” href=”https://site.com/shoes.htm?p=2”>
<link rel=”prev” href=”https://site.com/shoes.htm?p=3”>

NEXT
PREV
NEXT
PREV
NEXT
PREV
<link rel=“canonical” href=“https://site.com/shoes.htm” />
<link rel=”next” href=”https://site.com/shoes.htm?p=2” />
<link rel=“canonical” href=“https://site.com/shoes.htm?p=2” />
<link rel=”prev” href=”https://site.com/shoes.htm” />
<link rel=”prev” href=”https://site.com/shoes.htm?p=2” />
Self Canonical Self Canonical Self Canonical Self Canonical

NEXT
PREV
NEXT
PREV
NEXT
PREV
<link rel=”prev” href=”https://site.com/shoes.htm” />
• Canonicalising back to page 1 throughout the paginated series
• Confuses Google, breaks the chain, only page 1 gets indexed

NEXT
PREV
NEXT
PREV
NEXT
PREV
• Page 2 rel=“prev” pointing to non-canonical version of page 1
• Confuses Google and breaks the chain

Page 1
https://www.theathletesfoot.com.au/category-mens/mens-
run.html
Page 2
run.html
Page 3
run.html
Click to load more Click to load more

Disable Javascript in your browser, if NO pagination links are
available – it is problem
Check source code for pagination tags
rel=“next” or rel=“prev”. If missing, it is a problem

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly.html John Mueller’s example - http://scrollsample.appspot.com/items

John Mueller’s example - http://scrollsample.appspot.com/items
• Chunk your content up in to pages (eg, 16 products per
page)
• Each chunk/page contains a full URL (eg, /shoes?page=2)
• Implement pagination tags in the <head>
• Implement replaceState/pushState on infinite scroll
page – URL changes as the user scrolls down for more
products
• Works with and without Javascript – users and bots are
happy!

awesomesauce.com.au awesomesauce.co.nz awesomesauce.co.uk
awesomesauce.com
awesomesauce.com/au/ awesomesauce.com/nz/ awesomesauce.com/uk/

awesomesauce.com
Default website catering for “other” countries
Catered for AU users, unique
content and currency
Catered for NZ users, unique
Catered for UK users, unique

awesomesauce.com

awesomesauce.com
4
8 8 8
Google typically crawl from US
Google can only crawl the default website
Google CANNOT crawl these country
specific websites
Google CAN’T index what it CAN’T crawl

• Google can only rank the website that it can crawl
• Country specific websites will struggle to rank
• VERY little traffic and low indexation
.com .com/au/

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943?hl=en
• Exclude search engines from the redirect rule
• Make an exception based on user agents
• This will allow Googlebot to crawl and index all country
specific websites

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-in-mobile-search.html

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ https://gtmetrix.com/

https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/

Before – 907KB
After – 481KB

We all know the best practices:
1. Choose the correct file type (jpg vs png vs gif)
2. “Save for Web” in Photoshop
3. Use lossless optimisation for JPG product images
4. Save images to reasonable dimensions (for responsive
scaling, etc)
Yet, so many e-commerce businesses fail to ensure images
are optimised…WHY?
Source: http://httparchive.org/

https://imagekit.io/ https://cloudinary.com/
• Optimise images at scale
• Future proof image optimisation moving forward
• Plus the power of a content delivery network for speed

Chrome > Developer Tools > Sources > Coverage
https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/devtools-release-notes#coverage
98% of this CSS file is
unused!

Sitebulb.com
Check code coverage at scale while crawling the website
Export data for
developers

BEFORE: AFTER:

• Spider Traps – faceted navigation + filters + pagination combo
• Control what bots consume on your website
• Internal duplicate content triggered by product pages
• Pagination tags – cannot break the chain
• Infinite scroll using pushState & pagination tags
• Avoid automatic IP redirect – exclude bots if required
• Improving PageSpeed

Technical SEO for Ecommerce Websites

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