Worked example, e-commerce
An online shop that asked for link building: the audit that said no, and what it said yes to
An online shop with four hundred products and a steady trade from paid ads asks for link building, because a competitor's agency sold them links and the competitor ranks. The audit finds that most of the shop's product pages are not in Google at all, and says no to links first. These are the owner's questions, in the order they were asked, and what we said.
Written by Daniel Stoychev. The shop is a composite; the one indexing figure quoted from a real account is the air-conditioning case study published on this site, marked where it appears. Nothing on this page is a client result.
Worked example. The shop and its owner are invented to show how an audit reorders a request. The real figure referred to is on the air-conditioning case study page, and it is the only client number on this page.
The owner's questions
Six questions, answered in the order they came
| The owner asked | We said |
|---|---|
| Can you build us links like the competitor has? | Not first. Two hundred and forty of your four hundred product pages are not indexed. A link to a page Google does not hold does nothing. |
| Why are they not indexed? | The shop generates a URL for every colour, size and sort order, so Google found eleven thousand URLs for four hundred products, graded most of them as duplicates, and gave up on the rest. The report calls it crawled, currently not indexed. |
| Is that a Google problem or ours? | Ours. One canonical tag per product, the filter URLs blocked from crawling, and a sitemap that lists the four hundred and nothing else. |
| How long does that take? | Two weeks to change, then the wait for Google to recrawl, which it does on its own schedule. On a real account on this site, 33 of 53 dropped product pages came back within a week of the structural fix, and the other twenty are still not counted as done. |
| And then links? | Then we read what came back and which categories earn impressions. Links go to the category pages that have the demand, if they are needed. Most shops this size need the categories written before they need anyone to link to them. |
| What would you not do at all? | Buy links, write two hundred product descriptions by machine, or add a blog nobody asked for. All three have cost shops like yours more than they returned. |
The one fix first
What the structural change is, in plain words
A shop system makes a page for every combination a visitor can click. A blue jumper in four sizes, sorted by price, is a different URL from the same jumper sorted by name. Google treats each as a page, finds thousands of near-copies, and files the lot as duplicates. The fix is to tell Google which one is the product: a canonical tag on every variant pointing at the plain product URL, the filter and sort parameters kept out of the crawl, and the sitemap trimmed to the four hundred real pages. Nothing a shopper sees changes.
The e-commerce service page describes the same fix as a service. The air-conditioning case study shows what it did on a real catalogue of 120 pages, with the number that came back and the number that did not.
The order of work for a shop
What follows the fix, and what is measured at each step
- Indexing, read in Search Console: how many of the four hundred are in, four weeks after the fix. Nothing else is judged before that number is read.
- Category pages: the ten categories written for the searches people make, with the products beneath, because a category is what ranks for a product-type search and a product page ranks for a model number.
- Product data: price, availability and the identifier in the structured data on every product, and a Merchant Center feed, because Google names both as inputs to its AI answers for shopping.
- Only then, links: to the categories that earn impressions, from suppliers, trade press and the shop's own customers, never bought.
What the audit refused to measure
Three things left out on purpose
- A domain authority number, because it is a third party's estimate and not a thing Google reports.
- A ranking for the shop's brand name, because the shop already ranks first for it and a report that leads with that number is hiding the rest.
- The competitor's link profile, because knowing where their links came from would not change the first fix, and the audit is about this shop.
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