Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Dubs! Would any of these be able to do what I mentioned in my post?

Hi!

One of my clients has an online shop built on a custom platform. Following my on-page audit, I found multiple issues with the faceted & filtered navigation.

After doing some research, I've developed a good site architecture based both on keyword targeting and on user experience. Since the client's platform is custom and he is no longer in contact with the original webmaster, I'm looking to recommend an e-commerce CMS that would fix the issues he has and allow for proper navigation using facets + filters.

I'll give you an idea of how I've envisioned the new site architecture (with a random example):

The website has 3 main categories:

• Jackets
• Shoes
• Pants

These categories are completely separated, no products exist in more than one category.

Let's take the Shoes category. It has the following facets (these are like subcategories, in the form of links, indexable by the search engines):

• By Brand:

• Brand 1

• Brand 2

• Brand 3

• By Genre

• Men

• Women

• Unisex

• By Type

• Running

• Flip-Flops

• Boots

Each product of the Shoes category will belong to one of each facets (so you can have a product that belongs to Brand 1, for Women, of the "boots" type).

Now, each of these facets also display filters depending on the facet itself. These are non-indexable, and preferably done through AJAX. For example, if I select Shoes -> Men I get a list of filters that can also include options from the other facets (so I'll have filters for "Size", but also for "Brand" and "Type"). When I select Shoes -> Boots I won't have the "Type" filter anymore (or I can have it pre-selected I guess), but I will have the "Size" and "Brand" filters.

So, what I am looking for is for a CMS that can allow product attributes (like "Type", "Genre" or "Brand") to be used both as facet categories as well as filters.

The closest live example I could find is ASOS, where you can search products by Brand (facet) and have the refined afterwards by Type (filter) or you can search products by Type (facet) and refine them by Brand (filter).

So, any idea of an e-commerce CMS that would allow me to do the above (bonus points if it also allows entering descriptions for facets, similar to what ASOS does)?

Thanks!

Hey Simon,

If you're referring to the Link Intersect/Competitive Link Finder tool, you can check my recently published competitive link analysis guide for Excel, right here on Moz!

Hope that helps!

Yes it should. However, as Alan mentioned below, if you still have links pointing to the 404 pages, Google will always attempt to crawl them, and will keep you informed that you have errors.

If you do have external links to those 404 pages, you can 301 redirect them to an appropriate page using .htaccess. This way you'll keep the link value and also get rid of the Webmaster Tools error.

If you don't have any links to them, then yes, Google will eventually stop trying to crawl them.

Hey scoutzie,

This is actually covered pretty well in Joe Robison's blog post on fixing Webmaster Tools crawl errors: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-fix-crawl-errors-in-google-webmaster-tools

I'll quote the related info:

"One frustrating thing that Google does is it will continually crawl old sitemaps that you have since deleted to check that the sitemap and URLs are in fact dead. If you have an old sitemap that you have removed from Webmaster Tools, and you don’t want being crawled, make sure you let that sitemap 404 and that you are not redirecting the sitemap to your current sitemap."

Hope this helps, good luck!

There's no clear cut limit of how many heading tags you can use. As a rule of thumb, if it makes sense, use them.

Careful about placing too many however and using keywords in all of them, as Google might regard this as keyword stuffing.

Hey Lori,

It seems you're on ranking on the second page of results on Google. Except one or two, all your competitors have better metrics including Domain Authority, Linking Root Domains and number of links. You'll just need to keep getting good references and citations, and you'll slowly move up the ladder.

Hope that helps, good luck!

A major on-page problem for this website, check out these two URLs:

http://www.petstoreunlimited.com/tri-tronics-g3-g2-exp-collar-receiver-strap-5621150-blue/

http://www.petstoreunlimited.com/tri-tronics-g3-g2-exp-collar-receiver-strap-5621140-red/

According to the Copyscape Compare tool, they're 98% similar, so Google will certainly see them as duplicate content. Even worse, there are two more like it, for the yellow and green versions.

This problem is present with other product options, like pack quantity:

http://www.petstoreunlimited.com/2-pk-invisible-fence-battery-replacement-r21-r22-r51/

http://www.petstoreunlimited.com/4-pk-invisible-fence-battery-replacement-r21-r22-r51/

http://www.petstoreunlimited.com/6-pk-invisible-fence-battery-replacement-r21-r22-r51/

http://www.petstoreunlimited.com/10-pk-invisible-fence-battery-replacement-r21-r22-r51/

You've got two solutions:

• use a single rel=canonical for the pages that contain the same product so that they all point to a single version of this product (easier)
• use a single page for the product and allow users to see colors/size/etc. on the page either via a "Colors"/"Pack size" radio panel or dropdown, with optional JavaScript to change the photos if needed (more complicated).

Hope this helps, good luck!

No problem!

I don't know exactly where Moz uses pagination, so can't really tell.

However, using rel=next/prev in the anchor tag is allowed as well as defined by w3.org, it's just that Google won't take those into consideration because, as Maile says, "we’re concerned that links in the section make it possible for spammers to find less secure user-generated content (UGC) sites and then inject irrelevant links totally unbeknownst to the webmaster".

As a recommendation, do not use article submission sites. Most of them are of low quality and contain a lot of spam. Instead try outreaching bloggers or webmasters for guest post opportunities on related-niche websites.

As for post the article on your blog vs another website, it really depends on a lot of factors, including the article's target audience, how popular is the website you'd be able to submit it to, where in the lifespan of your blog are you, what your goals are, etc.

There's an excellent article with a lot of opinions that cover this topic: http://thinktraffic.net/guest-post-or-own-site

Hope this helps!

Hey pikka,

You can actually use both rel=next/prev and rel=canonical on the same webpage, but you have to be careful on how you use them.

If you don't have a view-all page, then DO NOT use rel=canonical on the review-pX page to point to the main product page. That's like saying "This page has identical content as the other one, so please disregard this one and use the other instead". It's somewhat of a 301 redirect, which would DEINDEX your review-pX pages.

However, using rel=next/prev is perfectly fine, and it's actually the recommended method when there's no view-all page. You can still use rel=canonical but only to point to the current review page (so basically you would use this just to filter out session IDs or any other parameters that lead to duplicate content).

So, in your case, you should use them like this (let's say we're on page 3):

<-- current page, "clean" url
<-- previous page, can contain parameters
<-- next page, can contain parameters

Do NOT use this:

Hope this helps, here's the Google support page on this issue and Maile Ohye's excellent video explaing it.

PS: Almost forgot, regarding your avatar:

1104.jpg

Hey Jean,

You shouldn't worry about that. There are people who had domains parked for years before starting to build content.

Write quality content, promote it, and Google will take notice regardless of when you launched your blog.

Cheers

The Just-Discovered section uses Twitter for new link discovery. As it says on OpenSiteExplorer:

"The Just-Discovered Links report indexes URLs within about one hour of being shared on Twitter, as well as the URLs linked from those tweeted pages."

Hope this helps!

Hey,

These are actually called one-line sitelinks (also known as mini sitelinks), and have been documented on the Google Webmaster Blog here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ro/2009/04/one-line-sitelinks.html

Basically, they're a more condensed (up to 4)  form of the normal sitelinks, and can appear for results other than the first result. Google uses them to show users other pages on that site related to their search term. Like the normal sitelinks, you can't really control when they show up.

Hope this helps, cheers!

Hey Lori,

It seems you're on ranking on the second page of results on Google. Except one or two, all your competitors have better metrics including Domain Authority, Linking Root Domains and number of links. You'll just need to keep getting good references and citations, and you'll slowly move up the ladder.

Hope that helps, good luck!

Hey,

I wouldn't worry about this. Your page has enough unique content so Google won't consider the snippets as being duplicate content. In addition, you interlinked the blog and the website, so Google is likely to see the relationship between the two and consider them as part of the same entity.

The only disadvantage you might have from not hosting the blog on the same domain is that a link to the blog won't provide the same link equity to the website. Other than that, I wouldn't change anything.

Hope this helps, good luck with your business!

Hey Tim,

You can still access it here: http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test

Don't really know if they plan to remove it or they just forgot to include a link into the new version.

Hope this helps!

Hey Margarita,

Try using the Googlebot User-Agent for Screaming Frog, since other bots might be blocked via .htaccess.

Hope this helps!

A major on-page problem for this website, check out these two URLs:

http://www.petstoreunlimited.com/tri-tronics-g3-g2-exp-collar-receiver-strap-5621150-blue/

http://www.petstoreunlimited.com/tri-tronics-g3-g2-exp-collar-receiver-strap-5621140-red/

According to the Copyscape Compare tool, they're 98% similar, so Google will certainly see them as duplicate content. Even worse, there are two more like it, for the yellow and green versions.

This problem is present with other product options, like pack quantity:

http://www.petstoreunlimited.com/2-pk-invisible-fence-battery-replacement-r21-r22-r51/

http://www.petstoreunlimited.com/4-pk-invisible-fence-battery-replacement-r21-r22-r51/

http://www.petstoreunlimited.com/6-pk-invisible-fence-battery-replacement-r21-r22-r51/

http://www.petstoreunlimited.com/10-pk-invisible-fence-battery-replacement-r21-r22-r51/

You've got two solutions:

• use a single rel=canonical for the pages that contain the same product so that they all point to a single version of this product (easier)
• use a single page for the product and allow users to see colors/size/etc. on the page either via a "Colors"/"Pack size" radio panel or dropdown, with optional JavaScript to change the photos if needed (more complicated).

Hope this helps, good luck!

Hey Joni,

1. There's no problem crawling those links (Google campaign tracking uses parameter-based URLs as well). To ensure these links don't cause duplicate content issues, either set Webmaster Tools to ignore these parameters or use a rel="canonical" tag on your pages to indicate the correct URL (the last method would be better since it works for all search engines).

2. You can either use the Google Analytics campaign tracking by changing the name of your parameters to match the ones used by GA, or you can use event tracking with your own parameters through JavaScript (you can see an example of using this for tracking keyword ranking)

Hope this helps!