Chapter 31 — Exercises

Work these in order; they climb from recall to real diagnosis, rewriting, and strategy. Several ask you to inspect a live store — your own, your employer's, or any public online store you can view. Every tool named here is free. Items marked with a dagger (†) have full worked solutions in Appendix — Answers to Selected Exercises; odd-numbered items are worked there too. Attempt every item before you look.

The spirit of the chapter, kept in front of you: in e-commerce, the first question is never "what keyword?" It is "which page type does this intent want, and can I realistically win it?"

A. Recall and vocabulary

Exercise 31.1 — Define category page and product page in your own words, then state, in one sentence, which query type each is the right answer to.

Exercise 31.2 — What is faceted navigation? Give two examples of facets and explain how selecting one usually changes the URL.

Exercise 31.3 † — Define parameter URL and explain, with the chapter's arithmetic in mind, why a catalog of a few hundred products per category can generate tens of thousands of parameter URLs.

Exercise 31.4 — Define thin content without using the word "short." Then give three shapes it takes in an online store.

Exercise 31.5 — What is out-of-stock handling, and what are the three product-lifecycle situations a policy must cover?

Exercise 31.6 — In one sentence each, state the two opposite ways internal site search relates to SEO (one a trap, one an opportunity).

B. Applied reasoning

Exercise 31.7 — The chapter claims category pages are "the most valuable pages you're ignoring." Restate the argument, then name the single most common reason a category page fails to rank despite having plenty of internal-link authority.

Exercise 31.8 † — A retailer pastes the manufacturer's description onto every product page. Explain, from Google's point of view, why this makes those pages hard to rank — and describe what "information gain" would look like for a single product of your choice.

Exercise 31.9 — Explain why robots.txt and noindex "do not compose the way people assume." Describe the exact wrong outcome you get if you Disallow a parameter pattern in robots.txt while also relying on a noindex tag on those URLs.

Exercise 31.10 — Reviews are called the product page's "secret weapon." Give three distinct SEO benefits of genuine customer reviews on a product page, and state the one hard rule that makes all three valid.

Exercise 31.11 — Why does the chapter say the damage from unmanaged faceted navigation is "indirect" rather than a "penalty"? Name the two indirect harms.

Exercise 31.12 — Explain why deleting and rebuilding a seasonal category page every year is a mistake, using the idea of accumulated authority.

Exercise 31.13 — A colleague wants to noindex every product page that shares any text with a competitor. Give two reasons this over-reacts and one thing they should do instead.

Exercise 31.14 — Restate the "Amazon paradox" in two sentences: the half you can't win and the half you can, and the single concept (from Chapter 3) that explains why.

C. Diagnose the e-commerce problem

For each scenario, name the most likely cause and the first thing you would check or do. Some have more than one defensible answer — say why.

Exercise 31.15 † — A store ranks nowhere for "running shoes" but its individual shoe product pages rank fine for specific model names. The owner wants to "optimize the product pages harder" to win "running shoes." Diagnose the strategic error and name the page type that should target "running shoes."

Exercise 31.16 † — Search Console shows 8,000 products but 450,000 indexed URLs, and Crawl Stats show most of Googlebot's requests hitting URLs containing ?sort= and ?filter=. Name the cause and the ordered sequence of fixes.

Exercise 31.17 — A category page targeting "backpacking tents" has a 1,500-word keyword-stuffed block of text above the product grid, and it still isn't ranking well while bouncing hard. Diagnose two problems and propose a better structure.

Exercise 31.18 — After a big "spring cleaning," a store 301-redirected 6,000 discontinued products to the homepage. Rankings and crawl efficiency got worse. Explain what Google likely did with those redirects and what the store should have done instead.

Exercise 31.19 — A best-selling tent went out of stock for two weeks; someone set it to return a 404 "to avoid ranking a page we can't sell." When it came back in stock, its rankings had cratered. What was the mistake, and what is the correct temporary-out-of-stock handling?

Exercise 31.20 — A store's internal search results pages (/?q=...) are showing up in Google's index — tens of thousands of them. Why is this a problem, and what is the correct treatment?

D. On your own site (use a free tool)

Exercise 31.21 † — Pick a store (yours, or any public one). Take a distinctive sentence from one product's description, wrap it in quotation marks, and search Google. Record roughly how many other sites return the same sentence. Write one sentence interpreting the result as a duplication symptom.

Exercise 31.22 — On the same or another store, run a site: search for the domain and compare the approximate indexed-page count to the store's rough product count (check the catalog or an "all products" page). If indexed pages vastly exceed products, write one sentence naming the most likely cause and the report you'd open to confirm it.

Exercise 31.23 — In Google Analytics 4 (if you have access to a store's property), confirm site-search tracking is on and open the internal-search-terms report for the last 90 days. Record the top five queries and any zero-result queries. Write one sentence on what each zero-result query implies (product gap, synonym, or content idea).

Exercise 31.24 — Open one category page on a store and, using the Rich Results Test (free, from Google), check whether it and a sample product page carry valid Product/BreadcrumbList structured data. Note what is present and what is missing. (Structured data is Chapter 18 — this is just a reconnaissance pass.)

E. Read the report / read the SERP

Exercise 31.25 † — Interpret this excerpt.

FIGURE E.1 — "A store's indexing snapshot"                   [constructed teaching example]
  Indexed pages: 11,000
  Not indexed: 380,000
    — "Crawled – currently not indexed": 210,000
    — "Duplicate, Google chose a different canonical": 140,000
    — "Alternate page with proper canonical tag": 25,000
    — "Excluded by 'noindex' tag": 5,000
  Product count in catalog: ~10,500

Which lines tell you faceted navigation is the culprit, which line is healthy (working as intended), and what would you do first?

Exercise 31.26 — Sketch (in words or rough ASCII) the organic results you'd expect for two queries: hiking boots and wide toe box hiking boots for flat feet. For each, say which page type or content type is likely to rank and whether a mid-size specialist store can realistically compete. Name the concept that explains the difference.

F. Optimize the page (rewrite)

Exercise 31.27 † — Rewrite this category page's on-page elements to match browse intent. Current state: <title>Tents | Summit Gear</title>, <h1>Tents</h1>, no intro text, a bare product grid. The page targets "backpacking tents." Provide (a) an improved title tag, (b) an improved <h1>, (c) a two-to-three-sentence useful intro that would not push products far below the fold, and (d) three internal links you'd add.

Exercise 31.28 — Take a real product page (any store) whose description is manufacturer boilerplate. Draft a short (80–150 word) unique replacement that carries genuine information gain — who it's for, how it compares, a real-use note, a fit or care detail. Then write a one-line title tag for it (brand + model + a key attribute).

G. Keyword and demand research

Exercise 31.29 — You run a store selling coffee gear. From the seed "coffee grinder," list four long-tail queries a specialist could realistically win and, for each, say whether it wants a category page, a product page, or an informational guide. Explain why "coffee grinder" itself is the wrong target.

Exercise 31.30 † — Given these five internal-search queries pulled from a store's search box — packable down vest (312 searches, 0 results), puffy jacket (280, results shown), merino base layer men (190, results), waterproof vs water resistant (140, 0 results), size chart (600, results) — classify each as a product/category gap, a synonym problem, a content opportunity, or a UX signal, and name the single most urgent action.

H. Myths, ethics, and judgment

Exercise 31.31 — Spot the myth. A popular e-commerce blog claims: "Duplicate content is a Google penalty, so you must write 1,000 unique words on every one of your 20,000 products or you'll be demoted." Identify the two separate myths bundled here and replace each with what the chapter says is actually true.

Exercise 31.32 — A vendor offers to "boost your product pages" by auto-generating thousands of thin tag-and-filter landing pages, each targeting a keyword combination, plus a package of purchased reviews with Review schema. Name the two distinct guideline violations, the Google systems most likely to catch them, and what an honest version of each idea would look like.

I. The Strategy File (Rivertown & Summit Gear)

Exercise 31.33 † — Rivertown Home Services sells about 25 SKUs online (replacement air filters, thermostats, UV bulbs). List the few things from this chapter that genuinely apply to that little parts store, and the things that do not apply — and explain, in one sentence, where Rivertown's real SEO effort should go instead.

Exercise 31.34 — Do the chapter's Strategy-File task on a business you know. If it sells online: run the duplicate-copy check (§31.2) on five best-sellers and the index-bloat check (§31.3) in Search Console, and write one sentence per finding. If it does not sell online: write the two-sentence case for why this chapter's playbook does or does not apply — the more valuable exercise, because choosing the right specialized playbook matters more than any tactic inside it.

Where these go next. Keep your answers to 31.22, 31.23, 31.29, 31.30, and 31.33 — internal-search demand and index-health findings are exactly the raw material a store's SEO plan is built from, and they feed the full audit you assemble in Chapter 38 and the capstone strategy in Chapter 40.