Chefscatalog.com Gets Critiqued
What did Chefs get right with its URLs?
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The merchant has canonicalized to “www” (either www or non-www is fine as long as one 301 redirects to the other).
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All lowercase letters are used in the URLs. Okay, almost got this right. While IIS servers don't care about case, it's a good practice to follow case styling, and a best practice to always use lowercase.
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Chefs used hyphens as word separators instead of underscores (_).
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There is good use of keyword URLs without getting too extreme (aim for 2 to 4 keywords separated by hyphens).
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The product URLs appear to be unique. Whether you find the product through the “New” or “Shop” dropdown, you get to the same product page.
But where'd they miss?
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There are unnecessary directories — key areas of the site that probably could have been made only one-level deep are a couple of directories deep.
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The recipe section, which is a rich content area, uses parameter-based URLs for the middle layer, leading to the actual recipes. Fortunately, the recipes are good keyword URLs.
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The filtering and sorting URLs are ugly with their “qstateid” parameters.
Very closely related to the quality of URLs is the notion of which URLs to include or, more precisely, exclude. Low search-value pages should be blocked from search engine spiders. They generally offer no real value and use up some of the crawl equity of a site.
Candidates for blocking include privacy pages, login pages, order-tracking pages or other pages that simply present a login or form for users to submit. The links to these URLs can be blocked using the rel=“nofollow” attribute; or, on-page meta or robots.txt instructions can be issued to turn the spiders away.
Other URLs that are often good to block are the filtering and sorting URLs, such as those mentioned above. This becomes a little trickier. Sometimes these are JavaScript powered and are complex enough that the spiders don't access them.
Other times, though, like we have here, they are parameter-based URLs. Site owners often mistake these as valuable pages and are reluctant to block them. The problem is that these URLs are often so similar, content-wise, that they appear as duplicate content to the search engines.
The vast majority of them won't deliver search traffic, as the search engines will select one as their canonical choice; however, they will all use up crawl equity and lead to URL bloat.
The content team at Chefs needs to tackle its title tag duplication. Title tags across paginated pages are extremely hard, if not impossible, for most sites to fix. But nearly every other instance should be a breeze.
One example where unique title tags could have a huge impact is the “Recipes”. The section is an important part of the site, or should be. While the recipes are free, they provide rich content that appeals to both spiders and humans alike.
Chefscatalog.com does a nice job of using the “Recipe” section as way to introduce and recommend products. But the entire section uses the site's default title tag and meta description. Perhaps at least an h1 would help out, but there aren't any on these pages, and the recipe name isn't text, but an image.
Overall, Chefs still has some of the usual challenges to work through: Its logo links to home.aspx instead of the root domain; some templates have heading tags, others don't, and on the subcategory templates, they have two h1s — and its meta descriptions could be spiced up a little.
But I'd say Chefscatalog.com is well on the way to a great recipe for SEO. The site is content rich and highly accessible to the search engines.
A little clean up here, polish there and brushing up on some of the fundamentals and Chefs may find itself sparkling at the top of the SERPs.
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