Optimizing Oracle Commerce For Enterprise SEO · content, which obviously presents a problem from an SEO perspective in relation to duplicated content. Due to the potentially vast

Ayima Inc - Company No: 5153683 – 270 Lafayette Street, Suite 805, New York, NY 10012

Phone: +00 212 219 8258 - Email: [email protected] - Website: http://www.ayima.com

Page 1 of 11

Optimizing Oracle Commerce For

Enterprise SEO

An Ayima White Paper by David Burgess

September 2014

Copyright Ayima



Page 2 of 11

The Oracle ATG web commerce platform is fast becoming the application of choice for the Fortune 500.

The ATG workhorse, combined with Endeca, (following the acquisition in 2011) provides richer, more customizable and personalized experiences for your customers, irrespective of the channels with which they interact. The forward-thinking retailers, embracing the Omni-channel retail approach are acutely aware of the need for a seamless experience from in-store, to desktop and on-the-go on mobile and tablet devices. An Oracle Commerce platform is one of only a handful of solutions that can deliver the true Omni-channel experience at an enterprise level.

That said, you would assume that enterprise level, industrial SEO capabilities would be delivered out-of-the-box. If you’re the SEO Director, VP of Internet Sales or CTO you will have to reset your expectations.

Akin to almost every CMS you would care to mention, Oracle has created embedded SEO capabilities in Endeca Experience Manager. Endeca Experience

Introduction

"Oracle Commerce delivers best-in-class commerce applications focused on personalized

experiences, business user enablement, and scalability to meet the evolving demands of

commerce businesses. "



Page 3 of 11

Manager and the Workbench tool is where you’ll spend your days. Here you can manipulate SEO elements of the page, as well as control the customer experience across your online touch points. As Marketers or SEOs, you finally gain autonomy over your website.

No longer should you have to wait for 4 weeks for a scheduled maintenance release to finally see your Black Friday Deals banner in place on the homepage. You’ll never again have to fight for IT man-hours in the next sprint to insert a link to your Mother’s Day gifts page. Oracle Commerce & Experience Manager empowers internal teams to update content on the website via a simple WYSIWYG interface.



Page 4 of 11

We’re in great shape then? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. If your focus remains at the page level, you’re setting yourself up for failure. You need to consider the inner workings of the application and how this will affect your website from a macro perspective, way before considering the on-page elements.

The problem with waiting to implement SEO in this final, ‘look and feel’ stage is that the fundamentals of on-page SEO, including technical site architecture, URL structures and duplicate content prevention will all have been ignored. If you do not consider SEO at the very inception, the application you’ll take control of will fail many of the most basic acceptance criteria, before you even consider the more complex SEO requirements you simply must have for a sector leading enterprise SEO program. If SEO is not considered at the core of the project from the outset, it will be incredibly difficult to retrofit best practice SEO onto your application.

One of the most critical stages of a migration to ATG Endeca is the planning. As an SEO working on such a migration, you need to ensure that what is going to be delivered by your development team or outsourced IT partner will pass the acceptance criteria you set for all of the critical, technical SEO elements so crucial in the delivering success for the SEO program. Perhaps the most fundamental issue to address is the URL structure.

By default, Oracle Commerce relies on URLs with PIDs appended for product pages and gridwalls. The PID value relates to the SKU of the product within the database. Anyone who’s familiar with SEO on huge authority sites will know the pain of parameters and the on-going battle with Googlebot crawl errors. Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors becomes a second home as you attempt to manage the 404 and 500 errors generated by Googlebot concatenating URLs in an attempt to discover new content on your authority domain.

That ignores the fact too that your PID-driven URLs won’t contain the relevancy signals, user benefits and QA friendly URLs driven solely of a keyword rich



Page 5 of 11

nomenclature. You need to work to define a keyword rich, SEO friendly URL structure, rewriting the PID based URLs.

So how can Oracle Commerce & Endeca affect your SEO Program? Endeca allows for a very high level of filtration of your content. Through what’s known as ‘faceted navigation’, users are able to filter category pages in many different ways to discover products. For the user this is fantastic functionality but for the SEO, this raises huge potential problems in a post-Panda world.

Imagine a pair of men’s jeans on a clothing site powered by Endeca Experience Manager can be associated with a number of different facets:

The problem as an SEO is that all of these facets are can be represented in the URL and depending on the path the user navigates, the facets can appear in any order.

• http://www.mystore.com/mens/jeans/blue/diesel/34/100-150/ • http://www.mystore.com/jeans/mens/100-150/blue/diesel/34/

Both of these URLs above will display the same products. Realistically a user may want to filter a gridwall (category page) to display blue and black jeans together

Example URLs

Example URLs



Page 6 of 11

but again, depending on the order in which they are selected, multiple URLs for the same gridwall are generated and linked to within the faceted navigation.

• http://www.mystore.com/mens-clothing/blue/black/ • http://www.mystore.com/mens-clothing/black/blue/

Again, these two gridwalls, on two separate URLs will both display the same content, which obviously presents a problem from an SEO perspective in relation to duplicated content.

Due to the potentially vast number of potential configurations of facets within the URL, serious indexing issues can arise. Below is a graph showing the after effects of an ATG Endeca release on an enterprise website. Notice the voracity with which Google indexes new URLs but also then the length of time it takes to remove extraneous URLs from Google’s index.

Huge rise in indexed pages on Google.com



Page 7 of 11

The volume of indexed pages rose from around 250,000 pages pre-launch to nearly 2.5 million in just over a month. 4 months later the indexed page count remained nearly 1.5 million higher than pre-launch.

The rich, faceted navigation also presents a problem relating to link equity. As we know, all of the faceted gridwall URLs are linked to within the code of the rendered HTML. Link equity is a highly prized commodity and you need to ensure that as much value as possible flows from gridwalls to the product pages where your transactions occur. Only when your site architecture allows equity to pass efficiently and optimally from gridwalls to product pages can you expect them to rank highly for prized, product related terms.

Facet navigation links (filter options) present in the HTML



Page 8 of 11

You’re going to need a robust strategy to prevent duplicated content. In the Oracle Commerce world, you’ll need a range of tools in your SEO armory and you’ll need to get creative to boot. The rel=canonical tag, robots.txt file and meta robots tags will be your best of friend. You’ll also need to carefully identify the canonical versions of your prized gridwall pages to ensure you’re not in danger from an algorithmic Panda penalty.

With SEO still accounting for the lion share traffic to e-commerce websites and with Google still owning 70% market share in organic search, SEO must be baked into the very core of your activities if you are to succeed in today’s world. The most savvy amongst the C-Suite of the Fortune 500 companies now not only ‘get’ SEO, but also demand that the entire organization play a part in SEO. Since SEO touches every core department within a business, it truly becomes everyone’s job.

Oracle has a proven track record of excellence in online commerce. Their Commerce suite provides huge flexibility and empowers internal stakeholders with tools to manage truly personalized websites that deliver best-of-class experiences to users. However, in order to succeed in organic search on the Oracle Commerce platform, the SEO team needs to play a central role in the transformation. If you believe that a coat of SEO paint, applied just before your new purring Rolls Royce of a website rolls out of the factor will be sufficient, you could suffer long-standing consequences. That said, when SEO is embraced and aligned at every stage of the Oracle Commerce re-platforming, the results can be spectacular.



Page 9 of 11

• Carry out in-depth analysis of existing Oracle Commerce instances • Define your URL structures • Create a detailed requirements document for SEO • Ensure SEO requirements are fed in alongside to the main Business

Requirements • Vocalize the requirements with IT partners & external agencies • Define which URLs you want to get indexed • Plan how you’ll prevent duplicated content from being indexed • Befriend the IT team. They’re building the castle

The keys to success with an Oracle Commerce Migration

Technical SEO Toolkit for Success with Oracle Commerce

SEO orders following a successful Oracle Commerce launch

Planning & Preparation



Page 10 of 11

• Befriend the infrastructure team. They hold the keys to the castle • Enable crawling of upper and lower staging environments • Set up critical monitoring of server status codes • Set up Nagios monitoring on sensitive files such as robots.txt

• Integrate with IT teams to ensure correct development of SEO enhancements

• Integrate with QA teams to ensure enhancements are tested and signed off • Be ready to work through the small hours on release night • Your servers create the heartbeat of your website. Create an SEO ECG to

monitor everything

Implementation Tips



Page 11 of 11

David Burgess is the Chief Operating Officer of Ayima Incorporated, based in SoHo, New York City. A specialist in technical SEO on complex websites, he has overseen numerous successful Oracle Commerce Migrations for Fortune 20 enterprise clients.

For information on how Ayima can assist your SEO program, please email [email protected] today.

About the Author

Documents

Optimizing Oracle Commerce For Enterprise SEO · content, which obviously presents a problem from an SEO perspective in relation to duplicated content. Due to the potentially vast