How do we get search engine bots to the item detail pages?
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The problem we have is that we have lots of inventory pages. These inventory pages have a bunch of links at the top linking to different styles of the item, up to 56 links in some cases. Then each item listed has a link to the item's detail page and a link to the item's shop owner's page. So if a page has 50 items shown, there are really 100 links just for the inventory. This is not taking into account the header links, footer links, sidebar links to other sections on the site.
We have all these links to help consumers move through the site. The problem is that every item detail page on the site is not getting indexed and actually I think it's more like over 50% of the item detail pages are not indexed because the search engines are too busy following all these other links.
Should we nofollow, index the links to the different styles of the item, the shop owner page? Or what should we do to get the search engine bots to index our item detail pages?
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CFSSEO,
Can you share the site so we can have a look at it to provide a better, more specific, answer for you? If not, I hope this general answer will help:
You should only have one canonical page per product. Even if there are product variants (size, color, etc...) those should typically be handled with a drop-down selector or checkbox on the product page instead of creating an entire new product page for each variant.
If this is a large affiliate or drop-shipping website where you are pulling in feeds from different merchants/distributors/stores the bitter pill you may have to swallow is that such sites are dying out in the SERPs because Google doesn't think they offer anything above and beyond their own search results. Someone wants to buy a Blue Widget and they go to Google and type "Cheap blue widget" and a bunch of merchants'/distributors' stores show up... why do they need to put another site in-between the searcher and their destination? The only way to work within this paradigm is to prune the site down and focus mostly on category-level searches, price comparison searches, etc... and by offering more useful features, including robust customer reviews for products and merchants, tools to help the shopper compare options, in-depth buying guides to educate shoppers on their choices... but thousands of product pages with default manufacturer content will no longer do the trick, and may actually harm the rest of your site.
This may or may not apply to your situation. It is tough to give advise like this without knowing the site in question. However, I hope it has helped point you in the right direction.
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I'm worried the search engines are not indexing all the item detail pages due to too many links at the top of the inventory pages. There are so many options of itemA that there are 50 links about different types of itemA at the top of the page, then 50 items are shown with a link to the item detail page and a link to the 'shop' of that seller. Along with a search box on the page. And there could be hundreds of these items but default of 50 shown on a page. So there's well over 100 links on a page, and I'm worried the bots aren't finding all the item detail pages.
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You have to reduce the number of pages that Google "sees" when you are showing search result pages. If you have too many sort versions on a given query, you are giving Google a bunch of duplicate (or closely duplicate) pages to spider and it prevents them from getting down into your item detail page.
I would find a way to setup a main / generic pagination result so that Google can spider that and then as they go through each page, they find links into the products. All the other versions of your search results, I would no follow links to them or put them in a folder that you can robots.txt.
This way consumers can search and sort to their hearts desire, but you provide a clear path for Google.
Also, be sure to setup a XML sitemap and include links to all of your item detail pages. You can also split out into multiple sitemaps if you have large enough number of item detail pages. A good article on this is here
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