Site structure for SEO

[Basil959]

Any advice or comments would be greatly appreciated as I’m not a developer:

I have a small ecommerce site running on a woo theme, it has been up for about 3 months and despite huge effort on content I’m simply not ranking as I believe I should. I have had some assessments done by Moz, onpage, yoast and it appears most of my problem is a duplication problem.
Without giving away too much detail let’s say I have a site which sells multi plugs…

And I have the following products (I’ve taken all my own pictures, multiple angles renames images to focus keywords, written quality content..+++):

Phillips 2 plug multi plug white
Phillips 3 plug multi plug white
Philips 4 plug multi plug white

Phillips 2 plug multi plug black
Phillips 3 plug multi plug black
Philips 4 plug multi plug black

Phillips 2 plug multi plug red
Phillips 3 plug multi plug red
Philips 4 plug multi plug red

Ellies 2 plug multi plug white
Ellies 3 plug multi plug white
Ellies 4 plug multi plug white

And so and so on… I have setup the product search categories as follows:

Number of plugs/colour

So for example I have:

ww.Jackmulitplug.co.za/number_of_Plugs/2_plugs/Phillips_2_plug_multi_plug_white
ww.Jackmulitplug.co.za/number_of_Plugs/2_plugs/Phillips_2_plug_multi_plug_black
ww.Jackmulitplug.co.za/number_of_Plugs/2_plugs/Phillips_2_plug_multi_plug_red

and then also:

Brand/

ww.Jackmulitplug.co.za/brand/Phillips/Phillips_2_plug_multi_plug_white
ww.Jackmulitplug.co.za/brand/Phillips/Phillips_3_plug_multi_plug_white
ww.Jackmulitplug.co.za/brand/Phillips/Phillips_4_plug_multi_plug_white

Initially my idea was it would be easy to navigate from the home page but as I’ve learnt far into the development is that pages rank not the site.. (such an idiot..) I’ve been reading that I should add “No Follow” on to my product pages and rather try focus on the category pages to improve ranking… So my understanding is rather try to get (Jackmulitplug.co.za/number_of_Plugs/2_plugs) to rank rather the actual product page.. is this correct, doesn’t this just waste all the effort that went into the product photography, content..etc ….. ( I could cry..!)

Any advice…? Or should I be contracting a pro?

 

[friedpiggy]

Since I am about to undertake a similar project, I am quite keen to find out the answer to that question myself.

 

[IndigoIdentity]

I’ve been reading that I should add “No Follow” on to my product pages and rather try focus on the category pages to improve ranking…

I believe that you have this the wrong way around as it would make sense to index the product pages where the content can be a direct and specific match as opposed to the category pages which are more dynamic.

Dynamic content is bad for search and considering how many of the ecommerce themes are laid out, it's likely no wonder that your site or rather homepage is not ranking?

Either way, it takes about a year to really start getting decent feedback out of Google on a new e-commerce related domain.

 

[pjoub06]

The approach I take with SEO is to look at how successfull sites do it, and then replicate it. For instance Amazon focuses heavily on product page SEO, which makes sense because users who google products usually have intent to purchase.

Also by targeting a long tail, in this case lots of niche items, it's much easier to rank than for a broad category

 

[Basil959]

I believe that you have this the wrong way around as it would make sense to index the product pages where the content can be a direct and specific match as opposed to the category pages which are more dynamic.

Dynamic content is bad for search and considering how many of the ecommerce themes are laid out, it's likely no wonder that your site or rather homepage is not ranking?

Either way, it takes about a year to really start getting decent feedback out of Google on a new e-commerce related domain.

Even if the product pages are very similar, for example only a colour or number change?

 

[pjoub06]

Even if the product pages are very similar, for example only a colour or number change?

For similar products you'd want only one of the pages to rank. Use canonical tags to identify that page.

 

[IndigoIdentity]

Even if the product pages are very similar, for example only a colour or number change?

You should not have separate pages for each colour or number but rather try to include this as options within one page as it creates more beefy information in terms of what is available to index. Google always prefers more content but I think in this case it would be smart enough to know that these are basically dups and rank one higher than the others.

If anything, search engines work on content and if you've only got a few words in the page that are unique then you're going to have a really hard time trying to get into the decent results at all.