Max # of Products / Links per Page on E-Commerce Site
-
We are getting ready to re-launch our e-commerce site and are trying to decide how many products to list per category page. Some of of our category pages have upwards of 100 products. While I'd love to list ALL the products on the root category page (to reduce hassle for customer, to index more products on a higher PR page), I'm a little worried about having it be too long, and containing too many on-page links.
Would love some guidance on:
-
Maximum number of internal links on a page
-
If Google frowns on really long category pages
-
Anything else I should be considering when making this decision
Thanks for your input!
-
-
You are welcome.
Here is what I found for you:
http://www.casedetails.com/2011/02/10/what%E2%80%99s-the-right-number-of-outbound-links/
I regularly see pages with tons of outbound links that have much trust. However, in your case, I would recommend to focus more on your visitors' impression. CTR and time on site are also important. If your site is cluttered with links - they will feel confused and leave.
-
-Maximum number of internal links on a page
Depending on how powerful your site is, I would suggest keeping it around the 100 links mark per inventory pages; at least initially. If you offer the ability to see more products at once that will keep all of your customers happy. However, the fewer links per page, the more power you send down to your product pages. If you start building links to these product pages, though, that could become irrelevant - depending on competition. If you still need to give extra boost to specific products, look for ways to link them internally from other pages.
-If Google frowns on really long category pages
From what I read, Google doesn't really consider the navigation pages to be very valuable content. However, I would only be concerned with that if you were trying to rank your search pages. So, I would focus on what your potential customers would want. If you feel like you need to rank for a specific phrase, generate a landing page that leads into that specific inventory search.
-Anything else
I would suggest testing multiple designs. It's easy for us to tell you what you should do, but it's better to hear it from your visitors. Also, don't spend a lot of effort trying to get a specific search to rank, instead create a landing page for that product category, which will then lead into your search. You will have a lot of unique content on there, and your customers expect to see a landing page.
-
Slava,
Thanks for your reply. I'm still very curious if there is a recommended limit to the number of internal links on a page. If anyone could comment on this, that would be appreciated.
-
1. your site should have a very simple, tree-like structure
2. your visitors should get to the product page in 3 or less clicks
3. you don't want to have tons of links of product pages on your main page, see #1
4. the more pages with unique content you have - the better
5. the bigger the page - the slower the loading speed. Keep that in mind, you want as fast loading pages as possible.
6. for the rest - use common sense. Imagine you are a visitor of your website. Do you like what you see?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Links from a penalised site.
Hey Mozzers, Recently we have had a series of agencies in to pitch for work, one group mentioned that due to our association with a possibly penalised product review website, any links and activity associated with the brand would hinder our SEO. We currently have a good rating, but we are now no longer pushing our customers to the site as we move to a new platform. The current link back from this website is also no-followed. Any thoughts on how this could impact us? And how the agencies determined the site was penalised and causing us problems. Cheers Tim
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TimHolmes0 -
Validated pages on GSC displays 5x more pages than when performing site:domain.com?
Hi mozzers, When checking the coverage report on GSC I am seeing over 649,000 valid pages https://cl.ly/ae46ec25f494 but when performing site:domain.com I am only seeing 130,000 pages. Which one is more the source of truth especially I have checked some of these "valid" pages and noticed they're not even indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ty19860 -
How do we decide which pages to index/de-index? Help for a 250k page site
At Siftery (siftery.com) we have about 250k pages, most of them reflected in our sitemap. Though after submitting a sitemap we started seeing an increase in the number of pages Google indexed, in the past few weeks progress has slowed to a crawl at about 80k pages, and in fact has been coming down very marginally. Due to the nature of the site, a lot of the pages on the site likely look very similar to search engines. We've also broken down our sitemap into an index, so we know that most of the indexation problems are coming from a particular type of page (company profiles). Given these facts below, what do you recommend we do? Should we de-index all of the pages that are not being picked up by the Google index (and are therefore likely seen as low quality)? There seems to be a school of thought that de-indexing "thin" pages improves the ranking potential of the indexed pages. We have plans for enriching and differentiating the pages that are being picked up as thin (Moz itself picks them up as 'duplicate' pages even though they're not. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggiaco-siftery0 -
Pages that did NOT 301 redirect to the new site
Hi, Is there a tool out there that can tell me what pages did NOT 301 redirect to the new sites? I need something rather than going into google.com and typing in site:oldsite.com to see if it's still indexed and if it's not 301 redirecting.. I'm not sure if screaming frog can do that. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
2 Duplicate E-commerce sites Risk vs Reward
Hi guys I have a duplicate content question I was hoping someone might be able to give me some advice on? I work for a small company in the UK and in our niche we have a huge product range and an excellent website providing the customer with a very good experience. We’re also backed up by a bespoke warehouse/logistic management system further enhancing the quality of our product. We get most traffic through PPC and are not one of the biggest brands in the industry and have to fight for marketshare. Recently we were approached by another company in our industry that have built up a huge and engaged audience over decades but can’t logistically tap into their following to sell the products so they have suggested a partnership. They are huge fans of what we do and basically want a copy of our site to be rebranded and hosted on a subdomain of their website and we would then pay them a commission of all the sales the new site received. So 2 identical sites with different branding would exist. Based on tests they have carried out we could potentially double our sales in weeks and the potential is huge so we are excited about the possibility. But…..how would we handle the duplicate content, would we be penalised? Would just one of the sites be penalised? Or if sales increase as much as we think they might, would it be worth a penalty as our current rankings aren’t great? Any advice would be great. Cheers Richard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_9950 -
Magento E-Commerce Crawl Issues
Hi Guys, First post here! I am responsible for a Magento e-commerce store and there are a few crawl issues and potential solutions that I am working and would like to get some advice to see if you agree with my approach. Old Product Pages - The majority of our stock is seasonal, therefore when a product sells out, it is not usually going to come back into stock. However the approach for Magento websites is to leave the page present but take the product off the category pages, so users can still find these pages from the search engines and they are orphaned pages as not linked to from elsewhere and not totally clear products are out of stock (just doesn't show the size pulldown or 'Add to Basket' button). There is no process in place to 301 redirect these pages either. My solution to this problem is to: 1. Change design of these pages so a clear message is shown to users that the product is out of stock and suggest related products to reduce bounce rates. I was also planning on having a link from an 'Out of Stock' page on the site to these products so they are orphaned but is this required do you think? 2. When I know for sure (e.g. over a month) that the product will not be returned (e.g. refund) by the user, then 301 redirect the product pages back to category page. How do other users 301 redirect their pages in Magento, I would like an easy to use system. Crawl Errors Identified in Google Webmaster Tools It seems in the last 2 weeks there has been a sharp increase in the number of soft 404 pages identified on the website. When I inspect these pages they seem to be categories and sub categories that no longer have any products in them. However, I don't want to delete these pages as new products might come in and go onto these category pages, therefore how should I approach this? A suggestion I have thought of is to put related products on to these pages? Any better ideas? Thanks, Graeme
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | graeme19940 -
Best practice for retiring old product pages
We’re a software company. Would someone be able to help me with a basic process for retiring old product pages and re-directing the SEO value to new pages. We are retiring some old products to focus on new products. The new software has much similar functionality to the old software, but has more features. How can we ensure that the new pages get the best start in life? Also, what is the best way of doing this for users? Our plan currently is to: Leave the old pages up initially with a message to the user that the old software has been retired. There will also be a message explaining that the user might be interested in one of our new products and a link to the new pages. When traffic to these pages reduces, then we will delete these pages and re-direct them to the homepage. Has anyone got any recommendations for how we could approach this differently? One idea that I’m considering is to immediately re-direct the old product pages to the new pages. I was wondering if we could then provide a message to the user explaining that the old product has been retired but that the new improved product is available. I’d also be interested in pointing the re-directs to the new product pages that are most relevant rather than the homepage, so that they get the value of the old links. I’ve found in the past that old retirement pages for products can outrank the new pages as until you 301 them then all the links and authority flow to these pages. Any help would be very much appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
How important is the HTML structure for on-page/on-site SEO?
To be more specific, say a page layout has Header, Body, Left Sidebar, Footer sections. Which layout from the following options is more SEO-friendly? Header > Body > Right Sidebar > Footer Body > Header > Right Sidebar > Footer Does it make a big difference to code HTML so that the the copy of the body appears in front of all other sections when spiders crawl a website? Is it worth taking extra steps to make this happen? I am asking this question because our site has a header navigation with a lot of dropdown menus. So I assume that this is "noise" for spiders as it pushes the main content of the page down. Please bear in mind that the question is more geared towards how search engine see the page rather than how it appears to the end user as layout can be controlled by CSS.This question also assumes that all other on-site SEO best practices are followed for both options.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Saugar0