Indexing problems is a common headache that website owners have to deal with. The good news is that there are several approaches that can be used to fix them.
The essence of an e-commerce site is to generate traffic and eventually make sales. One of the challenges that indexing problems bring about is when parts of your site don’t get added to the Google index and therefore visitors are unable to find your content. Whereas there is no single factor that can be attached to this problem, a combination of different elements may be the cause of your troubles. However, there are solutions and you only need to identify and apply the right approach. Here are some strategies to help you avoid indexing challenges on your e-commerce site.
- Avoid Duplicate Content
Content with high levels of similarity are filtered in search engine results and denied a chance of proper indexing. This is especially common on websites with a vertical structure because it offers both the ease of crawling and filtering content. Keep in mind that page rank denotes the importance of a page. It, therefore, goes that pages that are less important and have duplicate content will be ignored by Googlebot during the crawling process.
One way of circumnavigating this challenge is adding enough descriptions that are also unique to avoid page-to-page similarities. Studies have continuously shown that potential customers will abandon a site due to lack of information. Duplicate content simply creates conflict with other websites thus decreasing your chances of standing out.
- Using Canonical tags
Canonical tags give a way to represent the, master copy without creating a duplication problem. E-commerce platforms can create several URLs that still present the same product and category nut the focus should always be to ensure that your unique content is not left out while crawlers narrow down to ranking factors.
There are a number of ways you can make canonical tags to work to your advantage:
- a) Self referencing: This is where duplicate tags point to the master URL.
- b) Canonicals the home-page: People link to the homepage in a number of ways. In this case, you can put a canonical tag on the homepage which helps you to avoid a number of unforeseen problems.
- Pagination
Pagination precisely refers to the way in which content is sequenced on your blog. It is more or less the ability to separate content into discrete pages. Using the right combination for your category pages, product category and arrangement as well as internal search mechanisms, pagination markups can assist the search engine to outline the relationship between all these elements thus helping in better indexing of the pages.
- Specify of the URL
The URL is an extremely important aspect of proper indexing. It helps to direct searchers to specific parameters while looking for information. In return, the search engine uses this information to categorize information appropriately.
Google has a specific way of categorizing your parameters into active and passive. The active parameters have an effect on content on any given page. It, therefore, acts as a product filter. The passive parameters, on the other hand work, like a session ID, something that determines when a page was visited.
URL can be added and removed alternately. Removal is, however, a temporary measure as the URL will only remain unseen on the search results for 90 days.
- Good Site Structure
A proper site is good for both the users and for the search engines. It ensures that pages are easier to find and respond quickly to user queries. Proper site structure has a lot to do with where your products rank especially when it is an e-commerce website. Even when you have so many products and pages to be ranked, the proper structure allows ease of navigation and location of the products under search.
It works very well when backed up by the appropriate keywords.
In case you have a bulk of pages meant for your website, you may consider faceted navigation. This kind of site navigation allows products to be organized according to what the user is looking for through filters. By so doing, visitors are allowed to narrow down to specific items using keywords and other filter mechanisms.
Final Thoughts
E-commerce is a competitive niche right now and website owners look at all possible ways of making their websites stand out. One of the known elements is that search engines, and Google, in particular, has so many ways factors they use to index websites. The other thing is that these matrices keep on changing and are influenced by a number of dynamics. For this reason, it is important that website owners and any SEO company track their performance vis-à-vis that of competitors from time to time. Other issues that might affect your indexing include:
PageRank: This of relatively great importance as it determines how valuable a page is by weighing the quantity and quality of the pages it is linked to. Whereas PageRank is a complex idea, it is important to know the key issues that help your page to be rated in within a given index.
Connectivity issues: Sometimes it happens that Google crawlers are unable to reach your site. Under such circumstances, it becomes a challenge to have your content and your website indexed. This is common when maintenance work is being carried out on a host server.
Inherited issues: This is particularly common with websites which you picked up and grown to current status. You might need to find out what and how the website was used for and know how it ranked. One of the common challenges is with websites that have been involved in spammy links and Google plainly refuses to rank them.
Conclusion
It is not impossible to achieve the proper indexing. However, knowing the parameters search engines use to influence indexing makes it easier to tailor your content to a particular niche. At the same time, e-commerce website owners must make deliberate efforts to upgrade their knowledge as various technologies determine the performance of their websites.
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