In this talk I go through how to use indexation & cannibalization analysis to improve search results through the telling of two customer stories. Also, I speak about different ways you can experiment to make the processes move faster and adapt to changing user behaviors.
7. +
• Meet Brian.
• Works at a major shoe retailer with both
brick and mortar stores and a large online
presence.
• Site was losing traffic and revenue YoY.
• No one knows why.
Something’s Afoot
8. +
Something’s Afoot
Do we need to
rebuild this thing?
Not a great mobile
experience.
There are a ton of
technical issues.
There’s not a lot of
content on the site.
9. +
A-Ha Moment!
One thing I didn’t mention is
that we have 45 Million URLs in
the index, and the site only has
about 12 thousand. WHAT?!?
10. +
Real Problem
• Massive Index Bloat.
• Google can’t get to the important pages
because it can’t get through all of the junk.
• Next Step: What’s junk and what’s not?
11. +
Let’s Dig In!
Main Culprits
Search Pages
Faceted Nav Pages
Duplicate Pages
Paginated Pages
No Canonicals or Rel=Prev / Rel=Next Tags
Other Issues
Search engines just couldn’t get to the real pages often /
ever because there was too much junk.
Uh Oh!
14. +
Takeaways• If you have 45 million URLs indexed
and only have 12,000 pages on your
site, something is probably wrong.
• Small technical changes can have a
big impact.
• Use your robots file to definitively
block and de-index pages.
• Sometimes it’s best to just flip the
switch (though I would still do things
like this in phases).
16. +
• Meet Vikas.
• Owns a large ecommerce site that sells
cables.
• Site was slow growing YoY in both traffic
and revenue even with optimization efforts.
• He couldn’t figure out why.
Not Connecting
17. +
I HAVE SPENT
THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS
OVER THE LAST TWO
YEARS AND NOTHING
HAS WORKED!!
Not Connecting
Ok, walk me through
everything you have
done up to this point.
18. +
Connection Made!
Hmm, let’s
see…
We optimized
thousands of
title tags
Updated meta
descriptions
too
We also did a
lot of heading
tags
Fixed broken
redirects
Added
compression to
our images
Added Romance
copy to the
product pages
Wrote a TON
of blog articles
Fixed broken
internal links
Did some link
building
Wrote a TON
of blog articles
Mixed up templates
for the different size
& color product pages
Switched to
secure
23. +
(What I Wanted To Be) The Plan
• Update product template to combine all color / size
pages using dropdowns instead of separate pages.
• Redirect all color / size pages to main product pages
to combine equity.
• Add more content to main product templates.
• Block search result pages.
31. +
Takeaways
• Competing with yourself is beating yourself.
• There’s nothing wrong with a safer, phased
approach.
• Sometimes you have to alter your plan (even
though you know it’s going to work!) to align
with your customers comfort level.
• You should have a somewhat automated
way of checking for cannibalization as your
site grows and changes.
33. +
This Took Too Long
l
• Weeks were spent pulling this data by
several people, this was NOT efficient.
• We needed to think more at scale, not
project to project.
• Needed to experiment and come up with a
new process, one that was universally
accessible to the team.
Don’t Want To Be This
Guy Again
34. +
The Ask
Guys, pulling all that
data manually sucked,
can we figure out a
better way to do this?
35. +
How can we make
pulling data like this
easier and more
accessible to everyone?
The (Other) Ask