Best Practices for Pagination on E-commerce Site
-
One of my e-commerce clients has a script enabled on their category pages that allows more products to automatically be displayed as you scroll down. They use this instead of page 1, 2, and a view all.
I'm trying to decide if I want to insist that they change back to the traditional method of multiple pages with a view all button, and then implement rel="next", rel="prev", etc.
I think the current auto method is disorienting for the user, but I can't figure out if it's the same for the spiders.
Does anyone have any experience with this, or thoughts?
Thanks!
-
Thanks Everett - I was coming to that conclusion, but really just needed some back-up. I appreciate your response!
Emily
-
Smallbox,
This reply assumes that the "auto scroll feature" you mention is what is also known as a form of "progressive loading", though progressive loading can also be used to load unseen files like scripts and tracking pixels. On-scroll progressive loading of page content is a standard that more and more websites are using, including Twitter, and Google+ and so web users are getting very used to it. Most don't even notice that it's happening. Thus, I don't think it's a problem.
However, if you're talking hundreds or thousands of products, as opposed to dozens, you may want to provide an alternate viewing option, such as pagination. In that case, you would probably use the View All Canonical method as discussed here, providing your "view all" pages load all of the above-the-fold content within about 3-4 seconds or less: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html .
-
Thanks! I appreciate your response and understand what you're saying.
In this case, all of the products on the page are relevant and in the same category. And I get that it's best to have only one actual page...I'm just not sure about this auto-scroll feature.
I think I will leave it alone for now, and just keep an eye on our metrics/analytics.
Thanks!
-
Its easier for the spiders because its all on one page. If the pages are very long they can be divided up by sub segments and all of our existing ecommerce sites will use a search tab at the top which will allow them to fast forward to that page.
Couple of other important items.....Remember that for a customer to scroll through one long page, if the content is interesting, doesnt require them to click on another page and start over....this can be valuable with the proper call to actions.
It can be a problem if all the content is on one page for "relevancy" if it combines multiple products that are unrelated.....similar to the reason why you would create smaller adgroups within adwords.....if you have a page that is about building supplies and on that same page you have hammers and gas power equipment, you wont get the same "relevancy" value as having separate pages with separate content and separate sitemap designation (one page hand tools-hammers) (one page gas powered equipment-construction heaters, etc.)
Hope this is helpful.
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
-
Google cache is showing my UK homepage site instead of the US homepage and ranking the UK site in US
Hi There, When I check the cache of the US website (www.us.allsaints.com) Google returns the UK website. This is also reflected in the US Google Search Results when the UK site ranks for our brand name instead of the US site. The homepage has hreflang tags only on the homepage and the domains have been pointed correctly to the right territories via Google Webmaster Console.This has happened before in 26th July 2015 and was wondering if any had any idea why this is happening or if any one has experienced the same issueFDGjldR
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adzhass0 -
Using rel cannonical to host a blog as a path on our e-commerce website
There has been recent suggestion (from Rand) that hosting your blog as a folder rather than a subdomain is much better from an SEO point of view. Unfortunately, our blog is hosted on a subdomain with a different technology stack to the main e-commerce site. We are finding it quite tricky to migrate to a folder given the different technologies. Is the following a suitable solution? - 301 redirect from mysite.com/blog/cool-blog-post to blog.mysite.com/cool-blog-post - And then put mysite.com/blog/cool-blog-post" /> on blog.mysite.com/cool-blog-post Would be great to have your thoughts on this guys - I can't figure out if it will work or be an SEO fail.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HireSpace0 -
SEO Best Practice for a multi-language and multi-country website
Hello Moz Community, I hope someone could help me identify the best action to take on an on-page optimization confusion I am currently having. The website I am currently trying to optimize is http://www.riafinancial.com/locations/us/home.aspx. There is an option to view a country specific version of the page, or language version (there are 2 drop down menus on the top, for country or for language). When viewing a country specific version of the page, the URL changes depending on country selected. Some country versions also updates the content to the language of that country, but some remain English. Example, when viewing the France version of the page (http://www.riafinancial.com/locations/FR/home.aspx), the content is updated to french version, but when viewing the China version (http://www.riafinancial.com/locations/CN/home.aspx), the content is in English. This is because we have not yet translated for all countries (this will eventually be all translated). Now, when viewing by language, the URL does NOT change. Example, in http://www.riafinancial.com/locations/us/home.aspx, you can choose French, German, Italian, Polish, etc. The content of the page will change based on language chosen, but the URL (including page titles, meta-descriptions) will not change. My question is, how should I approach this for on-page optimization? Canonical? Hreflang? Any input, feedback, recommendation, suggestion will be greatly appreciated. Thanks! Sharon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RiaMT0 -
Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?
I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)0 -
Huge Google index on E-commerce site
Hi Guys, Refering back to my original post I would first like to thank you guys for all the advice. We implemented canonical url's all over the site and noindexed some url's with robots.txt and the site already went from 100.000+ url's indexed to 87.000 urls indexed in GWT. My question: Is there way to speed this up?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ssiebn7
I do know about the way to remove url's from index (with noindex of robots.txt condition) but this is a very intensive way to do so. I was hoping you guys maybe have a solution for this.. 🙂0 -
Best approach for a client with another site for the same company
I have a client who has an old website and company A handles the SEO campaign for this site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ao500000
My client wanted us to create a new website with unique content for the same company aiming to double his chances of ranking on the 1st of SERP's and eventually dominating it.
So we created the new site for him and handled it's SEO campaign. So far we are ranking decently on the search engines but we feel like we could do better. The site we are optimizing for him uses the same company, tracking number and a virtual address in the same city.
Do you think Google has a problem with this set up?
We have listed the new site in the citation directories but I'm worried that we are sending google mixed signals. The company has two listing on each directories, one for the old site and another for the new site.
Another thing, Google+ Local for the new site is created and verified but is not showing up in local pack.
What is the best way to approach this mess?
We are looking into ranking for both local & organic results.0 -
What is the best tool to crawl a site with millions of pages?
I want to crawl a site that has so many pages that Xenu and Screaming Frog keep crashing at some point after 200,000 pages. What tools will allow me to crawl a site with millions of pages without crashing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iCrossing_UK0 -
On-Site Optimization Tips for Job site?
I am working on a job site that only ranks well for the homepage with very low ranking internal pages. My job pages do not rank what so ever and are database driven and often times turn to 404 pages after the job has been filled. The job pages have to no content either. Anybody have any technical on-site recommendations for a job site I am working on especially regarding my internal pages? (Cross Country Allied.com)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0