7 replies to this topic

[mattK]

Hello, I am currently working on an asp.net ecommerce website and had a question about product paging.

On the product listing pages, the paging links are in JavaScript; so the search engines are not following, and products not on Page 1 are not being indexed. For example Category1 could have 10 pages worth of products; but there is only 1 URL (www.mysite.com/category1.aspx)

Would there be Disadvantages / Negatives to changing the paging links into full URLs instead of the JavaScript links - (www.mysite.com/category1.aspx?page=2)

[Randy]

Welcome mattK !

Would there be Disadvantages / Negatives to changing the paging links into full URLs instead of the JavaScript links

No. And in fact there's an advantage to be had, since the search engines will then be able to get to and index those MIA pages.

[phaithful]

Something you should consider is that search engines don't always like pagination. (Especially when it comes to search result pages that could have extremely long pagination)

In addition, some ecommerce platforms mix and match products for various categories or it changes due to recommendations. So you may have product A featured on page 1 and then the next time a search engine returns it might be on page 2. You can see that this would be a problem if the products keep shifting places.

You might want to consider static category pages or building links directly to the products or category pages themselves. This way you avoid the pagination headache.

[mattK]

thanks for the feedback. I am pretty much stuck using product pages; as many of my categories contain over 100 products.

One of my main concerns is all these different things I read about internal page rank. The site probably has around 600 different categories; so changing the paging system would theoretically add so many new pages to my site in the eyes of the search engines. Basically, I just don't want a make a change that will negatively impact the search engine rankings.

[Jill]

so changing the paging system would theoretically add so many new pages to my site in the eyes of the search engines. Basically, I just don't want a make a change that will negatively impact the search engine rankings.

The search engines don't care if you add lots of pages to your site. They understand that it's your site and sometimes it changes and has lots of stuff added to it.

Stop worrying about what the search engines will think and just do what's best for the users of your website.

[Traffic-Bug]

QUOTE
Would there be Disadvantages / Negatives to changing the paging links into full URLs instead of the JavaScript links - (www.mysite.com/category1.aspx?page=2)
ENDQUOTE

I think you have confused the term "Javascript links". What I think is that you mean dynamically generated links. Javascript links are no good for search engines. Your user may have turned JS off too.

Basically if you have proper Sitemap then there should not be any problem indexing even 1000s of product pages whether they have links from the category pages or not. Look at some Volusion stores to see things like pindex.asp and cindex.asp (product index and category index). And in my case I have seen products coming in first 2-3 positions when all I had was a sitemap (XML) entry.

[Catz]

Stop worrying about what the search engines will think and just do what's best for the users of your website.

If only more people would pay attention!

[Lakshmi Narsimhan]

Traffic-Bug is right, we can employ static XML files to output a feed of results to allow indexing from one location. They don't have to be text links, but we need to have links somewhere on a crawlable page that the search engines can find and crawl them.

Link to static XML file from every page on site – this ensures all pages are available and avoids pages that are tucked in.