When you saw the cartoon giraffe on the telly and heard that unmistakable jingle, you knew shit was about to get real. It’s almost Christmas!
For anyone born in the UK during the late 80’s and early 90’s you’ll remember the famous Toys ‘R’ Us advert. That 30 seconds of telly got me, for one, foaming at the mouth at the prospect that the countdown to Christmas was on.
Alongside the classic Santa Coca-Cola advert, this has got to be one of the all-time greats.
“There’s a magical place we’re on our way there…” As soon as I heard that? I immediately felt myself becoming feral; turning into an absolute menace to society out of sheer excitement.
Anyway, as important as reminiscence is, what’s more important is tearing down the comeback of that staple childhood brand – Toys ‘R’ Us. More specifically, their UK site.
In case you haven’t noticed (I hadn’t until Steve over @ Sistrix let me know) Toys ‘R’ Us are now trading again in the UK. Their website is back online – no longer redirecting to the .com US site.
Great news! Well, until you dig a little deeper and realise the SEO for the toysrus.co.uk domain isn’t doing so great.
Toys ‘R’ Us was once a household brand and a high street giant
Over the years, the huge toy retailer had acquired some incredible links. Some of which were links to staple/pillar pages that are both powerful (parent category pages for example) and were a ripe old age too.
Up until the company had liquidated, these pages had been online since the Toys ‘R’ Us website launched its first ecommerce site – some 7+ years ago.
Fast forward to today, their website is now back online. It’s a bit rough round the edges, but I can forgive it for that.
I’m personally a massive fan of getting a MVP (minimum viable product) live quickly, then working out the kinks / smoothing down the edges as you go. It’s a better approach in most cases over delaying a launch trying to make a site perfect perfect (and often still having fires to put out anyway).
The readiness of the site to one side; what I can’t forgive is their approach (or lack of) when it comes to SEO. Before I drill down into this, let’s first look at the incredible rise and fall of Toys ‘R’ Us as a website:
What you can clearly see is from that date forward, their organic visibility has shrank to practically zero.
Now, if we take a closer look, we can see that there’s another drop in August of 2021, which is followed shortly after by a small bump up in visibility during December of the same year.
August’s drop and flatline was due to the fact that the .co.uk domain was at that point in time 301 redirected to the .com site.
As for the December ‘pick me up’? Toys ‘R’ us removed the 301 to the .com site and published an announcement confirming their return just before Christmas last year.
Toys ‘R’ Us have now been back online for a month – yet no increase in visibility. Why?
Although nothing in the world of SEO is an exact science, I have some theories – some of which are more likely than others. Equally true in the world of SEO, it’s rarely one single issue causing this but a perfect storm containing a number of issues that require attention.
Let’s break down each of them:
Google is still working things out
Naturally, it takes time for search engines to ‘suss out’ a new website. Crawling, rendering and eventually indexing can take a while particularly when de-coupling 301s
A day, a week, a month? There’s no exact timeframe when it comes to getting search engines to first crawl and eventually index changes made to a website or domain.
What I would say is that 3-4 weeks for such an authoritative domain to bounce back is unusual and for me personally, it doesn’t feel right. Particularly when you consider that there’s been no change at all in organic visibility.
If I was heading up SEO over at Toys ‘R’ Us, I would be obsessing over seeking out any other potential blockers preventing organic traffic from increasing.
Legacy URLs are largely being neglected
The URLs that were in use prior to Toys ‘R’ Us going into administration were powerful; acquiring some impressive links from domains like ITV and The Guardian.
Those links are currently being left to rot as these links resolve to a 404 page.
When you’re bringing an old site back to life, it’s critical that you:
- Use the same URLs where possible to minimise redirects (preferred)
- 301 redirect the old URLs to their new respective destinations
At the point of writing, I’d identified an eye-watering 1,065 backlinks that are broken with a worrying number of core URLs from the old site that just aren’t being redirected including:
- toysrus.co.uk/toys/ – A subfolder which, from what I can see, housed practically the entire website within it including products, sub categories and more.
- Hundreds of product page URLs
To add insult to injury, links to the old Babies ‘R’ Us subdirectory don’t appear to be pointing at the newly launched and now separate babiesrus.co.uk website (which used to live on the toysrus.co.uk site). They’re in fact pointing to the Toys ‘R’ Us homepage.
There’s a juicy great 302 redirect which could be responsible for the delay in ranking uplift
When the website was originally taken down, everything was pointed to a single page. That page would end up becoming the single most powerful page across the entire domain.
Problem is, it has now been redirected with a temporary 302 to the new home page.
A page with in excess of 1,850 referring domains and over 12k links should be handled with utmost care – especially if it’s the most powerful page of the entire site.
It certainly feels from an outsider’s perspective that Toys ‘R’ Us have nonchalantly tossed a 302 redirect from the now redundant announcement page to the homepage and this for one could be one of the key reasons why Google and other search engines are taking time to index the changes.
My recommendation here would be to 301 redirect this URL and all others that are deemed permanent.
Toys ‘R’ Us and focussing on prioritising SEO
It might not be immediately apparent what the underlying issue is that’s causing this flatline in rankings, but what is clear is that SEO isn’t being properly addressed.
From the looks of it, the new and reborn Toys ‘R’ Us brand is now exclusively online. With no high street stores to lighten the load, Christmas and peak trading season just around the corner and fierce competition from the likes of Smyths Toys, Argos and The Entertainer, Toys ‘R’ Us cannot afford to let their SEO fail and rankings just evaporate.
If they’re to come back strong, maximise their sales and project their margins in a vertical that’s already cut-throat, SEO needs to firmly and quickly become a business priority.
It’ll be interesting to see how Toys ‘R’ Us evolves over the coming weeks/months. I for one will be watching closely!
Whilst I’m here – there’s a few other SEO gaps to fix too
I couldn’t resist. Whilst digging into why the site’s yet to bask in its rankings from the glory days, I uncovered a handful of other small technical SEO issues that are worth mentioning.
Pagination isn’t SEO friendly impacting discovery and rankings of products
Once you arrive at the bottom of a category page (assuming there’s more items to review) customers can simply click on ‘Load more items’ which reveals the next set of products.
Pretty straigh forward and it’s easy to use. One small issue though.. Search engines can’t click and the ‘Load more items’ doesn’t translate to good old prev/next pagination. In fact, it’s powered purely by JavaScript without any hyperlinks at all.
This makes it almost impossible for search engines to review products beyond the first ‘page’ within a category.
It’s very unlikely that this issue will be responsible for the slow bounce back in rankings, but it will impact how quick search engines can seek out the site’s SKUs and it could limit how well products perform in the SERPs.
The desktop navigation only outputs HTML and links to categories on hover which impacts internal linking
This one’s a little bit quirky… So, the links that you can see in the main nav? Yeah search engines can’t access those (at least they can’t from the desktop site).
This is because the HTML (and therefore the links pointing to categories) only appears to display once you hover over the nav and expand the megamenu.
Until you trigger that meny to display, the HTML and all links within it are nowhere to be seen.
This issue will likely impact how efficiently Google can crawl through categories and potentially limit how well categories do in the SERPs due to poor internal linking.
Comments are closed.