Link Product Thumb & Product Name with same anchor link?

[AarcMediaGroup]

We have an issue on one of our sites we're monitoring a campaign for that seems to have TOO many links on each page. I think the biggest reason is that each product listing on each category page has two separate anchor links into that page. One for the thumb and one for the name.  So even though there should only be 60-70 links on each category page, that amount is being inflated because each product listing technically is being split into two separate links.

Question is, should I place the thumbnail and name within the same anchor link?  We do this on a lot of other sites we operate, but I'm not sure what's a better strategy.  It would seem to me that it would be better to have a single anchor link that shares the thumb and product name.

[Everett]

It is unusual to endorse one of the shortest answers on the page, but Axel is to-the-point and, IMO, correct in this case. You don't want to paginate too heavily because that creates more clicks to get to all of your products. In fact, Google even recommends using a View All canonical page if it doesn't affect performance (load time) too much.

The first link anchor is what counts so I respectfully disagree with dittoeffect, unless you were to link to the image on the product page from the image on the category page using a Named Anchor hashtag (could be a good thing to test).

You don't want a bunch of iframes on your category page either. Keep it simple. You run an honest eCommerce site, not an uber-competitive affiliate website where you have to put links into a redirect script that goes through a directory that's blocked in the robots.txt file, etc...

Make the alt text and link text the same unless you are testing the named anchor link idea mentioned above.

And as Alan Gray said, test. These are all just opinions based on experience until you test.

[loopyal]

Whatever you do, you should test and measure.

Only then will you know if it makes a difference.

There don't seem to be any definitive answers.

After you do that, you could tell others the results of your experiments.

[Autoschieber]

too much overhead in a productive space.

I would go Text & picutre in one link

[TheeDigital]

Ted, why don't you add pagination to your product pages?

You might list 10 items on a page and link the thumbnail image and product title to the item details page without any issues.

[dittoeffect]

This is a really good question. Actually what I think is best is actually keeping the links separate and using the appropriate and most descriptive text for the page the text link points to and using the next best phrase in the image for the alt text. ex if you have a product called "big red dog house" then that would be the text link anchor text and the image alt text would be "large red dog house".

To solve the issue of too many links you should create subcategories within the categories to display fewer listings per page to reduce the number of links.

Now if you are worried about burring products make sure to divide the categories as evenly as you can so they do not go too deep. So if you have 70 products that were on the "dog houses" page try to make the dog houses page lead to a page with two links to categories "small dog houses" with about half the products and "large dog houses" with the other half. this way you create a tree of sorts (you can make many categories). The idea is to layer your navigation to guide the user towards what they want to find while structuring your navigation to give your products the attention they deserve from and seo stand point.

hope this helps

[elephantseo]

Putting the product name & image in the same anchor is the best bet. You can put the image anchor in javascript without taking the image out of the search index.

[AarcMediaGroup]

Yeah, but I want the image to be linked. I don't want to do away with the image links in the search engines eyes.  I just want to link to both the most seo friendly way possible.  That's why I figured placing the thumbnail and the product name within the same anchor link could possibly be the best bet. Our images actually rank fairly well in google images so doing what you suggest would be suicide in that respect, either for the image, or for the anchor text which is likely way more important.

[elephantseo]

You could make one of the links a javascript link or embed in an iframe and exclude the iframe files from robots.