An Infrastructure Change for a Large eCommerce Site - Any advice?

[NigelJ]

Hello Mozers,

We're currently under going quite a large infrastructure change to our website and I wouldn't to hear your thoughts on the type of things we should be careful of.

We currently have close to 4,000 individual products each with their own page. The seo work is then driven behind certain pages which house a catalog display of groups of products. The groups are done by style.  An example is we have a page called "Style A" which displays 8 different colours of style A. We then seo the style A page and the individual items received minimal seo work.

The change would involve having one individual product page for each style but on that page the user would have the ability to purchase the different colours/variations via menus. This will result in approximately a %70 reduction in the size of our site (as several products will no longer be published)

The things we are currently concerned with are:

1. The lose of equity to those unwanted 'style A' pages - I think a series of careful planned 301s will be the solution.

2. Possible loss of long tail traffic to the individual products which might not be caught by one individual page per style.

3. Internal link structure will need to be monitored to make sure that we're still highlight the most important pages as well, important.

Sorry for the long post, it's a difficult change to explain without revealing the clients name - any other things we should be thinking about would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks

Nigel

[EGOL]

1. The lose of equity to those unwanted 'style A' pages - I think a series of careful planned 301s will be the solution.

If you redirect the discarded pages you might have a gain in equity.

2. Possible loss of long tail traffic to the individual products which might not be caught by one individual page per style.

Actually, with lots more words on a page you might have a gain in long tail traffic.  The only way to know is to try it... just saying this because it might not be a loss.

More important, you might be moving away from a potential duplicate content problem as these pages might be very similar.

3. Internal link structure will need to be monitored to make sure that we're still highlight the most important pages as well, important.

This job is always present.

[AnthonyMangia]

Your concerns are certainly valid, but in my opinion, I think you should definitely go forwards with your ideas.  Especially in the post-Panda world, we're seeing Google really reward simplicity in design and infrastructure.  Moreover, I think consolidating all of the different colors of one style onto one page makes the most sense for the users - in terms of creating an intuitive user experience and creating a faster and smoother browsing experience.

301 redirects are the right move for the product pages that you phase out.  I think you will find link building and SEO work on the product level much easier with less pages to focus on.  As far as the long-tail traffic loss implications, this is a valid concern, but obviously you can have a list of the different available colors on each product page.  I would also beef up my long-tail optimization with a push for user generated content in the form of user reviews.  If you don't already accept these, consider doing so.  If you do accept these, how about a promotion of some type to stimulate a big push to accrue some more.  You can have users select the color of the item they are reviewing in order to get those terms on the page more frequently.