Slava,

Thanks for your reply.  I'm still very curious if there is a recommended limit to the number of internal links on a page.  If anyone could comment on this, that would be appreciated.

We are getting ready to re-launch our e-commerce site and are trying to decide how many products to list per category page.  Some of of our category pages have upwards of 100 products.  While I'd love to list ALL the products on the root category page (to reduce hassle for customer, to index more products on a higher PR page), I'm a little worried about having it be too long, and containing too many on-page links.

Would love some guidance on:

• Maximum number of internal links on a page

• If Google frowns on really long category pages

• Anything else I should be considering when making this decision

Thanks for your input!

Tait,

Thanks for the answer.  I think the canonical tag would be ideal, but in terms of implementation, it would require some substantial code modification to the site / PHP code as I have a lot of categories, and adding this manually to each one would be very time consuming.

Would preventing the spiders from indexing any URLs with a "?" or "&" (which would only be dynamic URLs variations) cause any problems?  Or is this just not an ideal best practice?

Thanks!

Background:

My e-commerce site uses a lot of layered navigation and sorting links.  While this is great for users, it ends up in a lot of URL variations of the same page being crawled by Google.  For example, a standard category page:

www.mysite.com/widgets.html

...which uses a "Price" layered navigation sidebar to filter products based on price also produces the following URLs which link to the same page:

http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=1%2C250

http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=2%2C250

http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=3%2C250

As there are literally thousands of these URL variations being indexed, so I'd like to use Robots.txt to disallow these variations.

Question:

1. Is this a wise thing to do?  Or does Google take into account layered navigation links by default, and I don't need to worry.

2. To implement, I was going to do the following in Robots.txt:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /*?

Disallow: /*=

....which would prevent any dynamic URL with a '?" or '=' from being indexed.  Is there a better way to do this, or is this a good solution?

Thank you!

We are getting ready to re-launch our e-commerce site and are trying to decide how many products to list per category page.  Some of of our category pages have upwards of 100 products.  While I'd love to list ALL the products on the root category page (to reduce hassle for customer, to index more products on a higher PR page), I'm a little worried about having it be too long, and containing too many on-page links.

Would love some guidance on:

• Maximum number of internal links on a page

• If Google frowns on really long category pages

• Anything else I should be considering when making this decision

Thanks for your input!

Background:

My e-commerce site uses a lot of layered navigation and sorting links.  While this is great for users, it ends up in a lot of URL variations of the same page being crawled by Google.  For example, a standard category page:

www.mysite.com/widgets.html

...which uses a "Price" layered navigation sidebar to filter products based on price also produces the following URLs which link to the same page:

http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=1%2C250

http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=2%2C250

http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=3%2C250

As there are literally thousands of these URL variations being indexed, so I'd like to use Robots.txt to disallow these variations.

Question:

1. Is this a wise thing to do?  Or does Google take into account layered navigation links by default, and I don't need to worry.

2. To implement, I was going to do the following in Robots.txt:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /*?

Disallow: /*=

....which would prevent any dynamic URL with a '?" or '=' from being indexed.  Is there a better way to do this, or is this a good solution?

Thank you!