Last month at our SearchFest SEM conference, we reviewed House of Antique Hardware‘s web site in our Hot Seat portion of the event. After the event Bob Treuber, Marketing Director, and David Norris, Chief Technologist asked if they could continue the dialog between the panel as they had a few questions after hearing feedback from the panel. They also wanted time to explain to the panel why they had implemented certain things and why they hadn’t. The Hot Seat lead to a great offline conversation that we thought the membership and SearchFest attendees should be part of. Ian Lurie of Portent Interactive represented the panel on Round II. Below is the transcription of this offline conversation. Feel free to add your $0.02 and continue the conversation.
PANEL
1. Only ½ of the site is currently being indexed.
Are there Crawling issues?
Do the dots in the URL’s contribute to this?
HoAH
It’s true about half our pages are indexed. I regularly check Google’s webmaster tools, and there are no crawling issues reported. As our SEO plan revolves around category & product listing pages and not detail pages, we aren’t concerned with the indexing stats. The important pages are all being indexed, including plenty of URLs with the strange-looking periods in them. I don’t believe the URL formatting is causing any issues, or that we can do anything to increase the indexing depth short of getting more/better links.
Ian:
You still need to get these other pages crawled. At a minimum, you’re missing valuable opportunities to get traction for long tail phrases. More important, by cutting indexed pages in half, you’re losing a lot of potential link authority that you could funnel and silo for more competitive phrases. The raw size of your web site is very important in SEO, because it gives you more pages to optimize and interlink. So trying to differentiate between ‘important’ and unimportant pages is a bad idea. They’re all important.
As far as the URL formatting, it is definitely causing issues. It’s established fact that shorter, cleaner URLs get higher clickthru in the SERP. So even if your URL formatting weren’t affecting your site’s visibility, it’s affecting clickability. However, I do believe the unusual URL structure is causing issues, in 2 ways: First, search engines can’t sniff out a clear content structure using the URLs. Second, the unusual encoding is causing search engines to miss content.
The reason you’re not seeing errors in Google Webmaster Tools is because the search bots don’t detect an error – they see the unusual encoding and just ignore (in some cases) the stuff after periods. The real problems occur in urls that mix periods and standard query string variables, like this: https://houseofantiquehardware.com/s.nl/it.A/id.4975/.f?sc=10&category=40 That page, and pages like it, aren’t in the Google index.
HoAH
My understanding is that Google and other SEs will index sites based on their page rank (PR) – the higher the PR, the more resources will be spent indexing the site. Pages like the one you linked are not indexing problems but canonical URL issues. That page is in the Google cache, but under this form:
Search consultants have the benefit of a “perfect world”; as CTO I have to optimize within the limits imposed by the content management system of our commerce platform. Until this issue is addressed by the SAAS vendor, we don’t have much choice but to live with the inconsistent URLS. Since these pages are being indexed (using a different form of the URL) I don’t see it as a big problem. It’s my opinion that only getting more links would improve the indexing depth, and that only fixes from our CMS will allow us to get around the canonical URL issue (which I don’t think is hurting us much, since the pages are still indexed).
We have been hesitant to change any of our existing URLs on the site over to search-engine friendly ones out of fear of losing rankings. We will do a small test to make sure our CMS properly handles redirects to new SE friendly URLs, and if so we’ll do our entire site.
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PANEL
2. Meta tag descriptions could increase CTR on SERPs
HoAH
This is valid. We have chosen not to delve into this type of project in the past because there’s no good way to measure CTR on a SERP , the description doesn’t affect rankings directly, and there isn’t a lot of established industry knowledge about what makes a well-written snippet. It would be very difficult to test version A vs B to see which has the best CTR. In my opinion, the ROI on a project like this might never be positive (or measurable).
Ian
I’m an old-school marketer, and I will always choose well-written copy. In this case, if you have the opportunity to show well-written copy to your potential customers, why would you choose not to? And even ignoring that, we do know that searchers look for bolded keywords in search results. A well-written description tag will include the target key phrases, thereby showing more instances of those bolded keywords. That, in turn, will generate higher clickthru.
HoAH
We will revise the titles and add meta descriptions to a number of our top SEO pages and measure the results to see if it improves the clickthru rate on the SERPs
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PANEL
3. Some of our items can be found in multiple places, particularly New Products and ABH. The concern is that search engines might have trouble divining which URL to use for the canonical URL for product detail pages.
HoAH
This is a valid concern. At this time our CMS doesn’t support the canonical tag, which would be the most elegant solution to the problem. As our product detail pages are a very small part of our SEO efforts, I don’t feel this problem would be worth the time to address it through other means (like redirects, or removing the items from the duplicate categories).
Ian:
SEO is a collection of simple things that aren’t easy. Canonicalization is one of those things. You’ll need to do this as part of your efforts to best-funnel link authority around your site.
HoAH
Yes, it’s very frustrating to be limited in this way by our CMS.
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PANEL
4. Session ids on some URLs.
HoAH
This is done by our CMS, which only shows the session ID for the first click after a user lands on the site (to check for cookie support). They omit session IDs for spiders.
Ian:
The session IDs are getting picked up by folks who link to your site. So even though you’re filtering the session IDs for spiders, you’re still losing link equity. Here’s a Google search result showing sites that link to you with jsessionID in the URL. The result, again, is that you lose valuable link authority:
You can test for cookies without showing the session ID. In the mean time, I suggest setting up a wildcard 301 redirect to forward offsite links with jsessionid in them to their respective page URLs without the IDs.
HoAH
That is valuable feedback, thank you. Unfortunately, one more fact-of-life in the world of SAAS, we cannot test this directly. We have filed a case with your CMS/ commerce platform provider to test 301 redirects for session IDs. If the test is not successful, we will consider removing them altogether.
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PANEL
5. Images that lack optimization.
HoAH
All our images are optimized size-wise, and almost all images have an alt tag (although some alt tags aren’t that informative for blind users).
PANEL
6. Old Google Analytics code still present in some areas of site.
HoAH
We have put off installing the new code in case it changes the unique visitor counts, which we depend on. We are implementing Omniture now for more in-depth reporting, so we aren’t that concerned with the new code’s functionality.
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PANEL
7. Adding ‘click here’ or similar language to tier pages like this one:
https://houseofantiquehardware.com/s.nl/sc.10/category.-110/.f
HoAH
I personally believe that adding unnecessary words reduces the usability of pages, especially navigation pages, which are designed to get the user to their desired content as quickly as possible. We will do some a/b testing of this idea.
PANEL
8. Take our top 5-10 site search keywords and address them on the home page.
HoAH
We feel this was a great suggestion, and will test a version of the home page that does just this.
PANEL
9. Social networking/web 2.0 suggestions. A number of good ideas were proposed for ways we could participate in various communities.
HoAH
I am wary of most social networking ideas, as they don’t have a great track record of positive ROI. We are seeing reports that our customer demographic is increasingly moving to social media and we feel there is definitely some opportunity out there. The biggest hurdle is choosing a course of action that would provide the best ROI. We are developing a social media and bookmarking strategy to test this arena.
Ian: You are in the perfect industry to offer advice and by doing so build an audience of potential customers. If you don’t do it, a competitor will. However, if I have to choose between this and the SEO items above, I’d say do the SEO stuff first.
PANEL
10. Product recommendations can’t be seen by search engines
HoAH
This is a known shortcoming of our product recommendation solution. The ability to “work-around” the problem is complicated by limitations of our content management system.
Ian:
Any chance you can use a noscript tag or some such to show the same text again, but in a format that spiders can see?
HoAH
Unfortunately no. The content is coming from the product recommendation software server, and the only way to source it is with a JavaScript tag. Again a limitation of our CMS.
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Closing comments:
HoAH
Thanks again for the valuable feedback. I was hoping to get some usability feedback on our flash-based image galleries, such as this page:
https://houseofantiquehardware.com/s.nl/it.A/id.1445/.f?sc=10&category=9
but I understand time was limited and it looked like flash wasn’t installed on the demo machine.
Ian:
A few usability ideas for the image galleries – I quite like this product browser/gallery idea. However, I think you need to make the thumbnails larger, so that it’s easier for visitors to see what they’re going to select. Also, I’d put a slight border around each thumbnail, so it’s clear these are individual options. And I’d highlight or shade the item that the user has selected. I really think you’re on the right track with this!
HoAH
Thank you for the feedback. We are continually developing the flash application and will test your ideas in future versions.
I want to personally express my thanks for you taking the time to dialogue with us, Ian. It’s above and beyond what the Hotseat called for, and has been both interesting and informative. It’s always fun to get tips from experts in the field.
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