10 replies to this topic

[kalinkafx12]

i am building a directory of restaurants. There will be good 200-300 listings on one page (they have to be on one page as the site will contain various other lisitngs and navigation will suffer otherwise). I want each listing to start with a H2 name-cuisine-location, followed by a short description and some criteria.

I would rather use H2 for these reasons:
1) This style will be repeated many times throughout my site and will genuinely indicate prominent information. Using H2 with CSS is cleaner than clogging the code it with divs, spans etc.

2)I beliebe this is a fair optimisation technique as every H2 will indeed present one more restaurant that a user may be searching for. As such, i think it deserves better visibility, offering 200 different restaurants, than someone else who simpy wrote the word restaurant 200 times in whatever context. I am not trying to optimise beyond common sense, just to give credit to the content.

However, will the SE consider it a spam if there is a page with 200-300 high-density H2s with only slightly varying context, e.g. "XXX - Mexican Restaurant in Barecelona", "YYY - Moroccan restaurant in Barcelona", "JJJ - Spanish restaurant in Barcelona" etc.

I would rather not play around with the unform structure of the H2s as well for the sake of consistency - i want it to be very easy to scan, so things like "Mexican restaurant in Barcelona", "Barcelona restaurant, Mexican cuisine", "Spanish cuisine in Barcelona" will be much less desirable.

I would appreciate your help very much

[Jill]

Welcome kalinkafx12!

i am building a directory of restaurants. There will be good 200-300 listings on one page (they have to be on one page as the site will contain various other lisitngs and navigation will suffer otherwise).

Um nothing is written in stone. Why do there HAVE to be 200 - 300? That's just bad for so many reasons that the rest of your question can't even be answered.

It really makes no difference what you do with your H2's but it does make a lot of difference if you're putting 200 - 300 listings/links on one page. So I think you're asking the wrong question here.

[kalinkafx12]

Thanks Jill

Sorry, i dont understand. Do you mean problems with usability or problems winth indexing?

I know that this sounds ambitious. This is the plan, however. The visitiors will have a chance to zoom in on pages with a particular type of restaurants, or sort the top-level listings in various ways, so that the type they are looking for is closer to the top. They dont have to see the whole page.

However, i do want to offer a browse through everything there is, as well as an alphabetical listing (since i am not able to offer a search), abd i dont want to split it up into "see page 1, 2, 3, 4, etc". I find that quite annoying on other sites. I am hoping to structure lisitngs content in such a way, and apply a color scheme in such a way, that a direct vertical scanning can take people through a large number of listings relatively comfortably.

This is a big city and one can end up with either millions of short and comfortable pages (navigation and maintenance issues) or content-poor pages, like 5 restaurants in Barcelona. Anyway, this is the idea and i will try to get away with comfortable scanning rather than comfortable length.

Well, assuming i do want to do it this way, are you saing that 200 almost identical H2s are no problem?

I guess there is a more general question i have been up against recently - what if my site is a number of various directories and i want to be brief and to the point about lisitng what there is. I understand that some people try to create content because they dont have enough to rank, but what if it is in reverse - what if my lsitings involve a density of keywords that are "too much than what is acceptable". Do i too have to create content just for the sake of filling the space, to dilute the density away from suspicion?

Thank you for your help

[Jill]

Sorry, i dont understand. Do you mean problems with usability or problems winth indexing?

Both, they generally go hand in hand.

Well, assuming i do want to do it this way, are you saing that 200 almost identical H2s are no problem?

It won't matter because the links won't get spidered and indexed due to their being too many. The pages will be , and the engines won't be interested in them.

[kalinkafx12]

thats news to me. So there is a limit on acceptable number of links as well?

actually, im not really interested in indexing the pages off the listing, just the listing itself

[Jill]

Yes, 100 would be the max. But for usability even that's probably going to be too many.

[kalinkafx12]

another thing im now getting confused about is how do SE rank pages as crap just by a number of links?

sorry, i do apprecate your help, and you certainly know a lot about this stuff, im just trying to understand, at which point a comrehensive, quailty-content page that give people a lot of information and links them to a large number of locations with extra relevant info, at which point does a lot of information become crap? Sounds like a twisted algorithm. One of those no-logic google things to live with?

If you could elaborate Jill, that would be very helpful. Im just struggling to see the difference between small content page = good and large content page = bad, from the SE point of view.

[kalinkafx12]

thanks RE: 100 links.

[oneofthe3lions]

It may be useful the way you are seeing it but it is being suggested to you that the search engines will not like your site and you will never achieve all of your potential traffic if they cannot find and index all of your pages for a start.

Google will only 'read and follow' approximately 100 links, therefore if you use a consistant structure throughout your site then 2/3rds of your pages wont get found..

With so many links on a page , yes the engines may see it as 'crap' it wont nessacarily be the case that it is crap but much more chance of them seeing it that way with hundreds of links on a page.. If you read google guidelines then you will see this information posted there. Its in black and white.. If you go against googles guidelines then why wouldnt they dismiss you?

Take your time and think of an ingenious way of breaking the site up into smaller sections with perhaps 30 links on a page or something. This will probably be best not just for the engines but for your site visitors too!

oh, and as regards h2, i dont think it matters.. in fact you neednt call them h2's you dont need these headers to be called anthing at all.

[mal4mac]

When I'm looking for a restaurant in my town I don't want to scroll down and look through 300 links! Generally, I want to look at information about certain types of restaurant. So why not have links for Chinese, Indian, etc which take you to pages with a few dozen links each?

I agree page 1, page 2, -pahe 3... is a bad idea but why not "Chinese page", "Indian page"...?

[chrishirst]

not forgetting the "Oi mate! where's the nearest kebab shop" pages

(may need to explain that for the non-UKers )