Some of our clients who were ebay sellers, asked us if we could build functionality into the Vehicle Fits software to automatically create targeted search engine optimized pages, for each combination of vehicle + product that the store offers. We just could not resist, so introducing new with v1.2.0 is the SEO Vehicle Sitemap feature.
The extension will list each vehicle that has mapped product
To start out with, each vehicle you offer products for will be displayed on a site map that Google can crawl. After google crawls each one of these sections all the products that you have marked as compatible for that vehicle fitment will be listed.
The extension will list each product mapped to that vehicle, as Google crawls the site map!
Each product will get a targetted URL for each of it’s compatable vehicles!
So let’s say you sell Dash Kits for Hondas, and Toyotas, most of your customers probably find you right now by searching for “Honda Dash Kits”, well why not actually have landing pages for the people who are searching for specific product for specific vehicles, example: “Honda Civic 2006 Dash Kit”
With targeted pages for each vehicle/product combination, you can make sure you are doing everything possible to have the information your customers are searching for, you are putting it at their fingertips. Amazon.com and many other large online retailers have adopted this strategy of “servicing the long tail”.
We plan to continue adding more interesting & unique SEO features, to make sure you have a better Automotive E-commerce site then your competitor!
Hey there,
I´d like to compliment on this very clever idea for a Magento module. However I do want to raise some issues on a very delicated problem that I´m facing together with my client:
I think it is a very good idea to create landing pages for each vehicle fit in order to “serve the long tail”. But if I understand correctly, does this also mean that the same product will have multiple paths, hence duplicate content issues?
I´ve though long and hard about this problem, and I just can´t think of a good solution to this problem. Yet.
Hi David,
Thanks for the compliment. To be 100% open (and anyone who tells you otherwise is not being so), no one can tell you if it would cause duplicate content issues. Whenever these types of questions come up I always have a similar answer: Google designs algorithms that help users find what they are looking for, if they penalize legitimate content their users will go elsewhere, if they fail to penalize “black hat” content their users will go elsewhere. If we can assume this to be true, then we can assume that Google allows some “duplicate content”. For instance millions of people use the same text in their footer site-wide, but do not get penalized for duplicate content.
Generally when we talk about “duplicate content problems”, we aren’t talking about getting your site dropped out of Google (if they did that they would drop a lot of the “good” sites and Google’s users would go elsewhere for their search needs). Generally if you have multiple pages repeating the same keyword, that keyword’s “value” is just dispersed across those pages. So if you put “widgets widgets widgets widgets” on every page, Google would see that as more of a “stop word”, in the same way it doesn’t pay much attention to “a”, “and”, “or”.
In our case, we ARE duplicating the name of the product, but you must consider a few things before making conclusions
1) the name is already duplicated in your existing Magento site yet it ranks “well” (I assume). You have it on the sitemaps, you have it on the category, since Magento’s URLs aren’t canonical you have multiple versions of those category pages getting indexed usually (grid view, list view, sorting, etc..), plus the product pages themselves
2) we are duplicating the product name & description, however we are also adding new information “for Acura 2007″, furthermore only URLs which correspond to actual valid vehicle fitments will result in a URL rewrite, so in a way we are increasing Google’s vision into our pages. For instance Google recently released a feature that crawls your breadcrumbs (breadcrumbs are duplicate content? think not) and uses that to display your sites structure in search results.
Given these “assumptions” we can conclude you will not be penalized. I wish I could find this particular example where a search for a part of a song lyric ranks a page that has that term duplicated 100+ times ( which composed the actual lyrics of said song). So if my assumptions are true, which I believe they are, you should not risk any penalty. While your products may rank lower because you “diluted” their keyword density, you will rank higher for more specific searches.
I did similar projects for http://www.marinas.com, if you Google “marinas in florida”, we are #1 “marinas in connecticut”, #1 again “marinas in italy”… guess what? #1 “inlets in italy”, #1 again!
So you see we duplicated the word “marina” over a quarter million times, yet we still retain #1 ranking for each of our dynamic landing pages, and still retain #1 for the word “marinas”
Thanks for the comprehensive response. I feel like your response could have been a blog post on it’s own.
Hi again, thanks for your answer. I´d like to comment on a few things and also briefly explain what might be an elegant solution to what i think is an issue.
Okay, so what i meant with duplicate content issues in this case was first of all the product descriptions on the actual product page. This description would be accessible from same amount of landing pages as there are vehicles on which a product fit. This is no doubt a duplicate content issue with search engines. Not because of any kind of “penalty”, but because on a given search on a related keyword, Google and other search engines would not know which one of pages to actually present in the result pages. Cannibalization issues.
I have i client that are experienceing these kind problems now and are about to change platform. We are currently looking into either creating a similar solution to yours, that fit our nees, or possibly (and more likely) modifying yours.
I think there might be an opportunity for you guys to further develop your product and for my client to achieve better results.
So anyways, I figure the solution the above described problem might be:
1. Use a flat URL structure for all products, i e mydomain.com/product1 or mydomain.com/exhausts/product1
2. For all the duplicate product url:s (ex mydomain.com/honda/civic/exhausts/product1), use rel=”canonical” tag to refer back to mydomain.com/exhausts/product1
Also, further improvements might be.
1. Automatic creation of hierachical html titles for automatically created landing pages (do you have that already?)
2.Landing pages show up on the xml sitemap right? Why not have them show up in a (long) list in the CMS admin. That way you can add optimized text to a selection of them, or customized html titles, or add pictures and all sorts of goodies you might want.
3. Automatic bread crumb hierachies for the landing pages (you have it already?)
Anyways, feel free to contact me and we could discuss this further. (I think the world is ready for a properly SEO optimized e-commerce solution:)
Regards,
David
Thanks for writing back, yes I was going to suggest #2, putting a rel=”canonical” tag for the duplicated pages.
On marinas.com we had description text “duplicated” on each page and so far we are not aware of any negative impacts.
Your idea with the CMS is interesting for sure, Maybe we could so something where it was right on the product edit page. Could you send this as a suggestion in my tracker? tracker.ne8.net Thanks!