Blog
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Shopify filters and the crawl paths nobody chose
Every filter you switch on in a Shopify collection is a URL generator. Not one URL. A combination space, because customers can select more than one at a time and Google can follow the links. Nobody decides this. You add filters because the store needs them, which it does, and the URLs arrive as a…
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Every Shopify product has two URLs. That is usually fine.
Open any Shopify store and the same product is reachable at two addresses: /products/thing and /collections/whatever/products/thing. On a store with twenty collections, one product can have twenty-one URLs. This gets discovered in a crawl, panic follows, and somebody proposes a project. In most cases no project is needed, and I would rather explain why than…
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Service area businesses: drawing an area you can actually rank in
If you go to the customer rather than the customer coming to you, Google lets you hide your address and declare a service area instead. Plumbers, mobile therapists, roofers, cleaners, most trades. It is the right setting for those businesses and it produces a specific set of problems, because a service area is a claim…
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The footer that linked to somebody else’s business
On a med spa audit, the address in the footer belonged to a different company. So did the address on the contact page. So did the Instagram icon in the header. Three separate places on the site, all pointing at a business that was not the client. Nobody in the business had noticed, because nobody…
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Why you cannot rank across a whole city
The request comes in roughly the same words every time. We want to be in the map pack for the whole city. You cannot, and the reason is not competitive or budgetary. It is that one of the three things deciding the result is your physical address, and no amount of work changes where your…
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You rank on the website and not in the map pack. Those are two different competitions.
A clinic ranks third for its main service term in the ordinary blue-link results and does not appear in the map pack at all. The owner assumes something is broken. Nothing is broken. They are two different competitions with two different entry requirements, and doing well in one tells you almost nothing about the other.…
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Most of your product pages cannot rank
Most product pages cannot rank, and telling a client that is more useful than another list of on-page recommendations. Not because the pages are badly built. Because there are three thousand of them, they are competing against Amazon and the manufacturer, and the effort available is enough to properly do about twenty. The question worth…
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Click depth is a symptom, not a rule
Click depth is how many clicks it takes to get from the home page to a given page. The received wisdom is that everything should be within three, and like most received wisdom it is roughly right and badly explained. Three is not a rule. What is actually true is narrower: depth is a symptom,…
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Internal linking when the catalogue is too big to do by hand
The advice in most internal linking posts is: open the page, find a relevant phrase, link it to the page you want to rank. That works, and I recommend it, and it does not survive contact with a catalogue of nine thousand products. Nobody is hand-placing links on nine thousand pages. So the question on…
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Faceted navigation: index, crawl or block, per facet
Faceted navigation is the single largest generator of URLs on most ecommerce sites, and the decision about it is almost never made. It is inherited from the theme and then discovered two years later in a crawl. The maths is the problem. Six filters with five options each is not eleven pages. It is every…