Max # of Products / Links per Page on E-Commerce Site
-
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!
-
-
You are welcome.
Here is what I found for you:
http://www.casedetails.com/2011/02/10/what%E2%80%99s-the-right-number-of-outbound-links/
I regularly see pages with tons of outbound links that have much trust. However, in your case, I would recommend to focus more on your visitors' impression. CTR and time on site are also important. If your site is cluttered with links - they will feel confused and leave.
-
-Maximum number of internal links on a page
Depending on how powerful your site is, I would suggest keeping it around the 100 links mark per inventory pages; at least initially. If you offer the ability to see more products at once that will keep all of your customers happy. However, the fewer links per page, the more power you send down to your product pages. If you start building links to these product pages, though, that could become irrelevant - depending on competition. If you still need to give extra boost to specific products, look for ways to link them internally from other pages.
-If Google frowns on really long category pages
From what I read, Google doesn't really consider the navigation pages to be very valuable content. However, I would only be concerned with that if you were trying to rank your search pages. So, I would focus on what your potential customers would want. If you feel like you need to rank for a specific phrase, generate a landing page that leads into that specific inventory search.
-Anything else
I would suggest testing multiple designs. It's easy for us to tell you what you should do, but it's better to hear it from your visitors. Also, don't spend a lot of effort trying to get a specific search to rank, instead create a landing page for that product category, which will then lead into your search. You will have a lot of unique content on there, and your customers expect to see a landing page.
-
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.
-
1. your site should have a very simple, tree-like structure
2. your visitors should get to the product page in 3 or less clicks
3. you don't want to have tons of links of product pages on your main page, see #1
4. the more pages with unique content you have - the better
5. the bigger the page - the slower the loading speed. Keep that in mind, you want as fast loading pages as possible.
6. for the rest - use common sense. Imagine you are a visitor of your website. Do you like what you see?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google crawling 200 page site thousands of times/day. Why?
Hello all, I'm looking at something a bit wonky for one of the websites I manage. It's similar enough to other websites I manage (built on a template) that I'm surprised to see this issue occurring. The xml sitemap submitted shows Google there are 229 pages on the site. Starting in the beginning of December Google really ramped up their intensity in crawling the site. At its high point Google crawled 13,359 pages in a single day. I mentioned I manage other similar sites - this is a very unusual spike. There are no resources like infinite scroll that auto generates content and would cause Google some grief. So follow up questions to my "why?" is "how is this affecting my SEO efforts?" and "what do I do about it?". I've never encountered this before, but I think limiting my crawl budget would be treating the symptom instead of finding the cure. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks! *edited for grammar.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brettmandoes0 -
Google WMT/search console showing thousands of links in "Internal Links"
Hi, One of our blog-post has been interlinked with thousands of internal links as per search console; but lists only 2 links it got connected from. How come so many links it got connected internally? I don't see any. Thanks, Satish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Technical Organization of E-commerce Site
Hi Mozzers! I'm working on a site that is a bit of a mess (http://www.selectequipment.net/) and wanted to ask for some feedback on a couple of items. In addition to organizing the site by product category types, the client also has brand pages that include all products of a certain brand. One problem, however, is that I want to be able to target the relatively large number of consumers who are using searches of BRAND + PRODUCT type in the most optimal fashion. For example, someone looking for "Cutler Hammer Transformers". We have several products with different part numbers that would fit this bill and I'm wondering if we'd be okay just having several products (ie Cutler Hammer Transform 100xa, Cutler Hammer Transform 110xb) or if we'd be better off adding an organizational page for all "Cutler Hammer Transformers for Sale". There are a LOT of different combos that we'd need to do this for. Is it a good call?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Does anyone know how to appear with snippet that says something like: Jobs 1-10 of 80 in the beginning of the description on Google? e.g. like on: https://www.google.co.za/#q=pickers+and+packers
Does anyone know how to appear with snippet that says something like: Jobs 1-10 of 80 in the beginning of the description on Google? e.g. like on: https://www.google.co.za/#q=pickers+and+packers Any markup that could be used to be listed like this. Why is some sites listed like this and some not. Why is the adzuna.co.za page listed with Results 1-10 while some other with Jobs 1-10 ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | classifiedtech0 -
Working to Start an Shopping Idea Site - Which Totally Based On Scraping product from Ecom. How Quickly I should Add products and categories in this new domain.
How Quickly I should Add products and categories in this new domain. We are going to start its promotional by google adwords and facebook. I worrying about 10000's of product pages. kindly guide me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innovatebizz0 -
Links from new sites with no link juice
Hi Guys, Do backlinks from a bunch of new sites pass any value to our site? I've heard a lot from some "SEO experts" say that it is an effective link building strategy to build a bunch of new sites and link them to our main site. I highly doubt that... To me, a new site is a new site, which means it won't have any backlinks in the beginning (most likely), so a backlink from this site won't pass too much link juice. Right? In my humble opinion this is not a good strategy any more...if you build new sites for the sake of getting links. This is just wrong. But, if you do have some unique content and you want to share with others on that particular topic, then you can definitely create a blog and write content and start getting links. And over time, the domain authority will increase, then a backlink from this site will become more valuable? I am not a SEO expert myself, so I am eager to hear your thoughts. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | witmartmarketing0 -
Magneto site with many pages
just finsihed scan to a magento site. off course I am getting thousand of pages that are dynamic. search pages and other. checking with site command on Google I see 154,000 results which pages it is recommended to block? some people are talking about blocking the search pages and some actually talking about allowing them? any answer on this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ciznerguy0 -
3 results for a site on page one?!?
Hi, I've never seen a website rank on page 1 in position 2, 3 and 4 for one query, completely separate results as well. I thought they limited the amount of results from a website on each page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0