A tough look at Tender Heart

CANONICALIZATION

Oh boy. Right idea, but a bit of a mess here. If we go to Tenderheart.com, we do end up on www.tenderheart.com. But that alone does not a canonical URL make. Canonicalization isn't just about the destination, but the journey, too.

In fact, how we get there is in many ways more important. This might slip past you though.

To understand how this is being handled, I'd recommend using the HTTP viewer over at RexSwain.com and visiting Tenderheart.com (and www.tenderheart.com) with JavaScript turned off. Between those two methods, you'll see that a blank page loads up with a 200 OK header status. The underlying code is actually a JavaScript URL rewrite of sorts: window.location=”http://www.tenderheart.com/ibeCZzpHome.jsp?site=THT”.

That isn't ideal. What we want is a server level redirect to www.tenderheart.com that also sends a 301 header status code so we can capture and consolidate all of the authority.

Notice that the ideal also eliminates the file name and that “site=THT” parameter, which exists because the THT Designs' version of the site exists with the “site=RTHT” parameter. Yes, we essentially have two site variations here, further diluting the signals we are trying to send. The THT Designs version appears to be more for retailers, so we'll probably want to block this entire version from the search engines.

TITLE TAGS

Title tags continue to be the strongest signal at the page level that we can control. Avoiding and eliminating duplicate title tags, such as “Tender Heart Treasures welcomes you to the Heart of Country with original designs that make you feel right at home” on nearly every page will go a long way.

Every title tag should be unique and focused on the targeted keyword phrase for the page. Beyond making sure the URLs are crawlable, if you do only one thing to your site, from the home page down to each individual product page, this is it.

CONTENT DUPLICATION

Another area that plagues sites is URL bloat and duplication. The search engines have gotten much better at handling duplication, and the engines aren't penalizing sites for duplication — assuming true duplication and not intentional spamming. But excessive bloat and duplication dilutes a site's signals and crawl equity.

Only a certain number of URLs are going to be crawled at a time. Having the same content crawled via multiple URLs wastes crawl equity and may decrease the time before new content is found or search engines pick up new optimizations. While most of the URLs reviewed on Tender Heart were crawled by Google within the past 45 days or so, at least one cache date went back to early July.

Tender Heart needs to keep the session IDs out of the URLs. Another form of canonicalization, products should live at one URL, even if they might appear in multiple categories. Tender Heart is using URL parameters to set the breadcrumbs and navigation signals. Compare the following:

•http://www.tenderheart.com/ibeCCtpImDspRtejsp?section=47017&item=76786

•#8226;http://www.tenderheart.com/ibeCCtpItmDspRtejsp?section=47044&item=76786

Unfortunately, without that section parameter, we end up on the THT Designs version of the page:

•http://www.tenderheart.com/ibeCCtpItmDspRte jsp?item=76786

Navigational signals and the breadcrumbs are excellent site features (way to go!) for both users and bots, but it would be better not to use the URL as the way to pass that signal to the content management system.

PAGINATION

Challenges with pagination most often occur on category, subcategory and product grid pages, which often have little copy distinguishing them from other paginated versions.

Since Tender Heart has a small number of products within each subcategory, it might default to the “view all” version and use meta robots or robots.txt to block the bots from all other versions. It might also add the new canonical link element to each of those paginated pages, pointing back to the appropriate “view all” page.

META TAGS

Most of the meta tags being used are of little to no value. The most important, meta description, is unfortunately stock copy duplicated on most or all pages. Like the title tag, the description will show up in the search listing, so make this a targeted, relevant call to action.

Unless we are using meta robots to keep bots from indexing a page or following links, we don't need “index, follow” instruction, because that's just what they do.

As for the meta keywords, aside from ranking for the “Tender Heart” brand references and position 27 in Yahoo for one other phrase, the site isn't ranking within the top-200 spots within Google, Yahoo or Bing for any other meta keywords terms.

HEADINGS AND BODY COPY

Aside from the Sitemap page, where everything is an H1 heading, heading tags aren't used. Not as important a signal as the title tag, it's still a good practice to have one H1 heading on each page that reinforces the target search phrase.

Body copy is especially good to have on the category, subcategory and product pages to give them more value to search engines. Tender Heart is doing above average here for having body copy in place on many of these pages, but enriching them more for search would be wise. Moreover, the pages still can and should be human friendly, too.