In this episode:

  • How to handle out of stock products (we get quite detailed here)
  • Crawl optimization
  • How to optimize content on product pages
  • How to optimize content on category pages
  • Internal search page optimization
  • Handling content delivered in JavaScript on product or category pages
  • Common eCommerce SEO mistakes
  • The future of eCommerce SEO
  • How canonicals help
  • and we tackled LOTS of your questions from Twitter

Listen Now!

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Show Agenda and Timestamps

  • Episode Introduction [0:22]
  • Topic overview [0:29]
  • Luke Introduction [1:10]
    • What is Mayflex and what is Luke’s role? [1:35]
    • Is there a large difference between working with a B2B company versus a consumer oriented company when it comes to SEO? [2:41]
    • Where did Luke get his technical background? [4:08]
  • Product Questions [5:09]
    • General best practice to manage a discontinued product? [5:22]
      • Do you keep the same URL live and return a 200 code? [7:49]
      • At the point when you want to remove the product from the index what code or redirect do you use? [9:59]
  • Twitter Questions [13:00]
    •  Malcom Slade: If a site was dropping half its inventory, say 4000 product URLs would you 404/410 (ideally semi custom based on legacy product), redirect or a mix of both? [13:00]
    • How to handle a situation where each product is unique and one of a kind so constantly rotating through products [17:30]
    • Khushal: Is it ideal to noindex,nofollow product pages that have filters to save crawl budget? If yes, how much is the impact from a visibility and/or crawl frequency perspective [21:10]
    • Jeremy Rivera – What about store locations that re-sell manufacturer goods, e.g. a local billiard shop who sells a national brand’s good but can’t list a price? [24:34]
  • Product Pages Twitter Questions [27:46]
    • Andrew at Optimisey – What does the perfect product page look like? How do you resist the push to stuff lots of text into the page to ‘optimise it for keywords’? [27:46]
    • For a clothing retailer what is a good approach for content on their product page? [31:25]
    • Rahul Khosla – How do you avoid duplicate content for products that aren’t manufactured by yourself when discussing the set attributes? [35:15]
  • Earning Links to Ecommerce Sites [37:29]
    • Rob Bonham – What content types are the best in earning quality links to ecommerce websites? Also, what methods have been most successful in earning said links? [37:35]
  • Category Pages Questions [40:20]
    • Sebastian Simon – Which content/type of content would you put on category pages? [40:26]
    • Jeremy Rivera – Fixing the way categories (collections) work on Shopify to something sane? [42:46]
  • Canonicals / Technical URL Reporting [44:37]
    • Adam Humphreys – I think a majority of us just want a more simplistic reporting system to give to clients for their developers around canonical setups. [44:37]
    • How to sort through and work through all the canonical issues [46:40]
  • Redirecting Internal Search URLS [49:06]
    • Blue Array – Luke did a great talk at #ReadingSEO on taming large scale websites. He mentioned redirecting internal search URLs to their canonical (pretty/IA) equivalent if they’ve been crawled and indexed. Could he explain more about how that impacts user journey (+ & -). [49:06]
  • JavaScript [52:41]
    • Tony Kelly – Ecommerce category pages with product listings delivered through JS (angular) – it’s the only part of the page delivered in JS – is the ideal approach to deliver that via SSR, or is that overkill and CSR should do fine? [52:41]
  • Technology / Hosting [57:17]  
    • Patrick Coombe – for self-hosted sites, what is your preferred modern day hosting environment: hosted, cloud, container, serverless, or other? How can levering serverless technologies improve SEO? [57:17]
  •  Migrations [58:53]
    • Carl Ashfield – E-commerce website migrations as I have my first one some tips would help massively!/thanks in advance! [58:55]
  • Redirect Chains-  How do you deal with untangling redirect chains on old legacy sites? [1:01:26]    
  • Custom Extraction [1:03:48]
  • Schema and Reviews [1:05:18]
    • Claire Carlile – Regarding reviews and feedback loops – how best to automate review requests, which processes are most likely to result in a review, how to best implement review schema etc [1:05:18]
  • Ecommerce Strategy [1:10:01]       
    • Andy Simpson – What’s the most common mistakes Luke still sees e-commerce SEOs getting wrong. [1:10:05]
    • Izzi Smith – what do expect will be a huge focus for ecommerce sites in 2020 when it comes to SEO? [1:13:45]
  • How did Luke get the opportunity to speak at MozCon and is he speaking anywhere in the future? [1:18:45]
  • E-A-T Google Core Updates [1:22:49]

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About Dan Shure

Hi! I'm Dan Shure. I write all of the posts and host all of the podcast episodes you'll find on the Evolving SEO blog. Say hello on Twitter @dan_shure!

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