I'm planning the structure of a Car Parts e-commerce site and...

[yousayjump]

Hi all,

As the title says, I am redeveloping a website for a client who sells car parts. The market is saturated with competition and 9 times out of 10, www.eurocarparts.com appears within the top 5 SERPS when searching for the same things that my clients' website sells. Now I know it will be very difficult to compete with the likes of these sites but given time (plenty of time) you never know so I have dissected Euro Car Parts website for many hours to look at their internal link structure and so my question is related to this area.

My site only sells car parts for 4 car manufacturers.

The left hand "shop" navigation menu will list the categories in which the shop sells products for e.g:

Air Filters
Break Pads
Coilovers
Dampers
Suspension etc.

When you view one of those pages, there will be a form to allow the user to filter down to their particular make/model of car etc.

Now when I search for "Air Filters" in Google, the results come back as nearly 40 million. If I prefix that search term with a car manufacturer name i.e. "Audi Air Filters" the number drops down to 8 million - quite a difference!
So my thinking was to do the following but I wanted to see if you guys think I am barking up the wrong tree or if this is a good approach:

Create pages for my 4 car manufacturers for each "shop category" listing all the products I have in those categories for the manufacturer along with well written unique, relevant content, ie:-

Audi Air Filters
Audi Break Pads
Audi Coilovers
Audi Suspension

... this would allow me to target the slightly long-tailed version of "Air Filters" as I now have a page for "Audi Air Filters".

This would then mean when users click the "Air Filters" link from my left hand category menu, I would need to ensure that those pages were not indexed by the search engines as they would essentially be showing the same subset of products but with the title of the page being "Air Filters".

I hope I have explained myself enough for you to understand my question.

Ultimately I want to know if my approach is a typical one when knowing that even attempting to target "air filters" with a new website is going to be a lost cause - I need to try and get some of the lower hanging fruit.

Thank you for reading.

[yousayjump]

Hi Tony

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my question.

I take on board your comments regarding the top level menu structure, I will discuss this with my designer and see how we can get this to work.

Regarding the noindex of the "Air Filters" landing pages for example, the reason why I thought this would be applicable (in my original structure plan)  is largely due to the fact that the page content (i.e. the products listed in here) will be for the most part a collection of the products listed across my additional "Audi Air Filters" and "Ford Air Filters" pages so would this not be content canonicalization? I thought noindexing the "Air Filters" landing pages would be the correct thing to do?
Thanks.
Kris

[Tony-Dimmock]

Hi Kriscons,

From a target audience perspective, if your site only sells car parts of 4 x manufacturers, I'd suggest showing the car manufacturers prominently first and make all four car manuf top level category pages link to all their car parts. These pages would then be the main landing pages for search queries such as "audi car accessories" or "audi car parts" - and exactly what non-part-specific searchers would look for.

There's also no reason why a filter / form can't be added to each car manuf's main category page, as well as text links to specific parts pages, thereby offering navigation to the same part-specifc pages in two ways. Plus, well crafted manufacturer pages, using semantically related terms and providing other valuable content (videos, download guides, customer reviews etc) would show "subject-matter-expertise" and add to the overall value of each page.

So there seems little point in optimsing for "air filters", plus searchers may get disgruntled when they land on your "air filters" page to then find out that only 4 car manufacturers are catered for and their car manuf isn't listed.

To answer your Google blocking question, I wouldn't noindex or nofollow any pages only because one type of search volume is higher than others.. As said above, just don't optimise for them in the first place.

I'd use: Audi Car Accessories (or other related term) > Audi Air Filters > Specific Audi Make Air Filters

And not: Air Filters (potentially lots of disgruntled visitors) > Audi Air Filters > Specific Audi Make Air Filters

Hope this helps?