Will my site structure provide decent SEO?

[dbuckles]

We have an ASP.NET MVC website with a view that can dynamically display each product we offer. The product name is hyphenated in the URL, and this is what we’re using to pull the product from the database. So an example URL would be: http://www.mysite.com/Products/Florida/Sample-Product-Name

We have another view that dynamically lists the products offered for each state. This page would contain links to the URL for each product offered in that state. The URL for Florida would be: http://www.mysite.com/Products/Florida

We want to make sure that when we enter a new product into the database, the product is indexed by Google the next time our site is crawled. I know that Google will crawl through the links in our website, so the new product should get indexed as long as we have a link to it. In this case, the link will be on the view that lists the products for the corresponding state.

I have 2 questions:

1)      Is my understanding correct that Google will index the product page as long as it can find a link to it somewhere in my site?

3)      To get Google to index each URL for content that is generated dynamically from a database, is having links in my site for each URL the only way to do it? Is there something we can do with the site map?

Thanks in advance everyone!

-Alex

[HiveDigitalInc]

While you can get all pages indexed via a sitemap, the general rule of thumb is that if Google has to use your sitemap to find the page, it will probably never rank for anything. Good internal link architecture will be your best friend here. What we generally recommend is to "link early, link often".

On every product page, plan on linking to several other products before you get to the footer of the page. Some common methods of this are...

Top Products
Related Products
Recently Added Products
People who bought this also bought...
Recently Sold Products
Featured Products
Recently Visited Products

etc...

Any excuse to get more links to more pages. For example, let's say you sell 10,000 products and your goal is to have no product page be more than 3 clicks away from the homepage...

Click 1: The homepage links to 50 product pages (Top 20 Products, 10 Latest Added, 10 Featured, 10 Recent Purchases)
Click 2: These product pages each link to another 30 (10 Latest Added,  10 Also Bought, 10 Recent Purchases) (remember, Google will spider the site asynchronously so when it comes back the latest, featured and recent should have changed)
Click 3: These product pages also link to another 30 (10 Latest Added,  10 Also Bought, 10 Recent Purchases).

If this were perfectly random, you could potentially have links to 45,000 products. However, assuming there is some crossover (ie: google visits a products page and you havent added any new ones since the last page they visited), it is reasonable to believe that Google will find at least 1 link to all 10,000.

Note: use the "featured" listing to get things indexed. Feature products that havent been spidered yet by google.

[SeoStallion]

1. This is the principle although not a given. A good deal of this depends on your sites trust, trusted sites are crawled into far more detail than low trust sites.

2. You could possibly add each new product's url to the site map or alternatively submit each new url to the search engines (this only takes about 30seconds anyway). It is good practice to have an up-to-date sitemap to include all site pages that you would like indexed.