What's the best was to structure Product page information on my site?

[MikeATL]

Hi -

I run a hobby related niche new / article / resource site (http://tinyurl.com/4eavaj4). One of the most critical components of the site is our product database. We don't actually sell anything directly - instead we monetize them by displaying relevant affiliate product feeds and price comparisons.

However since the Panda update was implemented in February my traffic (particularly my long tail, product related traffic) has dropped off considerably. I had about a 20% drop in overall traffic, but have made up some of the ground in the past week.  However I want to know once and for all how I should structure my product related information as I have a ton of great content that is ready to be published in this section but want to be sure I structure it the best possible way from a SEO standpoint.

Here are a few different options I've come up with for displaying information about products on my site. For the purpose of these examples I am going to refer to all of the information that makes up my product pages collectively as "product profiles". Please let me know which is the best SEO wise (or if you have a better way of doing it let me know):

- Option 1 - Current Method - Divide Content Sections into different pages / urls

Example: http://tinyurl.com/4tpdlbl

This is how the majority of my product profiles are currently structured. I did this to improve load times and to keep the total number of links per page down. In addition to the core product profile subpages: "Product Details","Compare Prices", **"**Product Review", "Hot Auctions", and "Checklists", I have the Checklists area further segmented by subset, each of which is on its own page that is only accessible through the main Checklists tab of the profile.

- Option 2 - Everything on one url / page the old fashioned way, with everything available by scrolling vertically.

This would make the page go on forever though.

- Option 3 - Everything on one url / page, but visually segmented using css / javascript tabs.

Example: http://tinyurl.com/4kqhauh

I looked at the source code and all the page text is there, so it looks like it would be spider-able but you tell me. Or would another method of tabbing be better? My site is wordpress based so the functionality comes from a plugin.

- Option 4 - Use post tabs that are technically all on the same page, but make each individual tab be accessible through its own suburl, all of which share the same core canonical url.

Example: http://tinyurl.com/4bs9pjs

Clicking on any of the individual tabs will result in something like ?postTabs=2 being appended to the core url.  Example: http://tinyurl.com/4gvgufc

Any input would be greatly appreciated asap!

Thanks

Mike

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Mike

I have a site, it lost about 80% of traffic on the 7th of February. I have seen that there was some talk of results changing in the UK on the 7th but this one site has been hammered.

It's annoying really as the major competitor is almost a perfect case for how to cheat. The business provides several services all from one site as does the one I manage. But, they also have the URLs for each of these services  and use them as single pages designed to throw the user to the main site (duh - doorway pages) but... the thing is, it works for them, has worked for years and years and on this last update, it seems to be getting better.

Really annoying and likewise, I have not had any good feedback as to what the problem may be from other SEO folks I know.

So, good folks of SEOMoz - any ideas on this one? It may help me figure out what has gone wrong with my fathers site as well which is http://www.vinyltodigital.co.uk

Marcus

[MikeATL]

Marcus - Honestly I have no idea why my Google rankings dropped off. I've hired 2 different SEO experts to look into it and no one has been able to figure it out. My link profile is totally white hat and stronger then the majority of my competitors, I have 4000+ or so pages of unique, high quality content, am a Google News source, and publish about 5 new unique articles every day. I ended up deleting a 100 or so thin video pages on my site, did some url reorganization (using 301s), and fixed all the broken links. That appeared to be helping as my traffic was returning to normal. Then the bottom dropped out again. Since Saturday my daily traffic has dropped by 50%. I am really baffled at this point as to what to do so any help would be sincerely appreciated. Thanks, Mike

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey

Having a quick look, the current way you are doing things seems pretty sensible to me from a user perspective as you have separate landing pages for each section of information along with smaller pages, less links per page etc.

You say the drop off is post panda so is the structure of your site the problem? Did you have loads of poor quality links to these pages that have suddenly lost traction or could it be that some of the pages are mainly featuring content from ebay (hot auctions etc).

When you said you have made some ground getting traffic back, what have you been doing to improve things so far?

Not tons of help, sorry but I am not sure if it's the structure of the pages that is the problem here.

Marcus