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@Expand Online: You are absolutely right when you say more links don't pass the double amount of link juice, but I hear stories that a second link does pass a bit of link juice and takes away some of the advantage. Just wondering if it helps to make sure you just have one link for each product without thing away the usability for the visitor.

@João Vargas: It's not about cheating a search engine, it's just trying to make sure we are not wasting any unnecessary search engine resources. I'm not to sure what you mean with the second paragraph in your message though.

Hi All,

As we all know, having to much links on a page is an obstacle for search engine crawlers in terms of the crawl allowance. My category pages are labeled as pages with to many "one page" links by the SEOmoz crawler. This probably comes from the fact that each product on the category page has multiple links (on the image and model number).

Now my question is, would it help to setup a text-link with a clickable area as big as the product area? This means every product gets just one link. Would this help get the crawlers deeper in these pages and distribute the link-juice better? Or is Google smart enough already to figure out that two links to the same product page shouldn't be counted as two?

Thanks for your replies guys.

Rich

Thanks for your reply Asaf,

What I don't like about your solution is the fact that products keep moving between different pagination pages. This means Google will find the pages deeper in the hierarchical structure every now and then. It's hard to build a history on a specific ranking cause incoming link juice keeps changing.

Did you find out if hiding 'out of stock' items can cause a penalty?

Thanks again Asaf

Hi All,

I would like to hide all the products that are out of stock on my category pages, for example with a display:none (maybe there are better options/techniques do this....tips are welcome). The visitor has the options to reveal the out of stock items by using one of the filters, or by using a check-box "Show out of stock items".

Would this still be in line with Google's guidelines? Am I taking a risk to get a penalty cause I'm hiding content?

In my opinion it would not, cause I'm doing this to achieve a better user experience. Items are most of the time out of stock for a week not any longer.

Hope to hear from you guys.

Thanks in advance

Richard