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.

1. PatrickReinhart
@askreinhart
Conductor
Indexation, Cannibalization,
Experimentation, Oh My!
http://www.slideshare.net/PatrickReinhart

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Indexation
(A.k.a, wait a minute, Is It Indexing?)

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• 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

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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.

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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?!?

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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?

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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!

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Solution
9/26/2018 12+
We’re just gonna
block everything.

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Holy $#!+ Moment

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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).

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Cannibalization
A.k.a Your Site Is Competing With Itself

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• 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

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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.

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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

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xxxx
Different Color
Different Color
Different Size
Different Size
Different Size

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Both Are Cat6 Outdoor Waterproof Shielded Direct Burial
Ethernet Cables
2 Pages For 2 Different Sizes

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Both Are 5e Plenum Cables
2 Pages For 2 Different Colors

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There are
thousands of
these pages
competing with
one another.

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(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.

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(What I Wanted To Be) The Plan

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(What I Wanted To Be) The Plan

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(What I Wanted To Be) The Plan

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(What I Wanted To Be) The Plan

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(What I Wanted To Be) The Plan

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What We Actually Did

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Slowly But Surely
9/26/2018 30+

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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.

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Experimentation
A.k.a Stop Doing Things The Way You
Have Always Done Them

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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

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The Ask
Guys, pulling all that
data manually sucked,
can we figure out a
better way to do this?

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How can we make
pulling data like this
easier and more
accessible to everyone?
The (Other) Ask

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Working It Out
There’s not a lot of content
on the site.
Let’s do it in
Excel!

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Working It Out

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Working It Out
There’s not a lot of content
on the site.
Let’s try it in
Searchlight!

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Working It Out

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BOOM!

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Results

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Results

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Taking It A Step Cooler

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We Got Excited!

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AMP

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PWA’s

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Thank You!
9/26/2018 47+