Search by Brands

[Clive.Aspen]

A lot of stores now seem to have a 'search by brand' menu these days.

Ideally there would be a list of all the brands for the customer to click on the brand of their choice.

How would be the best way to implement this on an actinic site?

[leehack]

I'd argue a 'shop by brand' is better. Create a section called shop by brand, put a subsection in for each brand and duplicate your products into the relevant brand sub-section is the easy way to do it needing no actinic expertise. Example - http://www.quantumelectronics.co.uk/

[jont]

You can force Actinic into a psuedo dynamic tool to create dynamic pages at the desktop.

Eg for brand "Halloween" this page http://www.partyconnection.co.uk/aca...-costumes.html shows only the Halloween products without any duplicates

similarly brand = "Bangles" on http://www.paulabolton.net/acatalog/...-material.html only shows Bangles with the option to filter again (silver, coppers etc)

[Clive.Aspen]

I'd argue a 'shop by brand' is better. Create a section called shop by brand, put a subsection in for each brand and duplicate your products into the relevant brand sub-section is the easy way to do it needing no actinic expertise. Example - http://www.quantumelectronics.co.uk/

yes... shop by brand is what I meant really..
and yes, that is a simple solution.. thanks.

[Clive.Aspen]

You can force Actinic into a psuedo dynamic tool to create dynamic pages at the desktop.

Eg for brand "Halloween" this page http://www.partyconnection.co.uk/aca...-costumes.html shows only the Halloween products without any duplicates

similarly brand = "Bangles" on http://www.paulabolton.net/acatalog/...-material.html only shows Bangles with the option to filter again (silver, coppers etc)

Hi Jont,
Thanks for the reply,
I'm not sure how this is working.. is this a plug in?

[fergusw]

Clive,
If your products have a user defined variable for brands, and you have this selected as a searchable property, then you could do something akin to what this site has along the bottom footer area.

Basically, the logo images link to the search page whilst submitting the brand name to the search scripts thereby only returning brands that match.
http://www.giftandwrap.co.uk/

[Clive.Aspen]

Hi Fergus,

Thats pretty cool and what I was expecting a solution to do..
maybe easier than having every product duplicated...

I wonder if you would tell me
a/ how do I create a user defined variable for brands.
b/ how do you get four rows of search returns instead of the standard one.

Thanks

[fergusw]

Creating a user defined variable for use as a searchable product is well documented inside Actinic's help.
Creating four rows in search:
Normal does a plugin for this - http://www.drillpine.biz/actinicstuff/index.html
We do it by using CSS, floats, javascript and a few other tweaks and tricks to get it to show in columns.

[leehack]

Don't forget the seo benefits Clive, you're only focusing on how you can set things up the quickest.

[Clive.Aspen]

Ok Thanks Fergus.

Hi Lee,
What are the SEO benefits of having all the duplicate products?
I would have though that might even be a disadvantage.
and also a lot more work copying duplicates to a 'brand' section.

But I'm, not an expert so I may be missing something?

[Duncan Rounding]

I think Lee's ie referring to the returned search results which are not very seo friendly as they are generated by the perl scripts and complex cgi-bin links.

Even if Google sees duplicated content it will simply list just one of the pages, you won't loose both. The grouping by brand is for user convenience, it doesn't really matter if Google doesn't index it.

You don't have to duplicate SPP pages to group products in a section by brand. You can use cut down duplicates with a links through to the same master SPP pages. Depends if it works for your products really.

[leehack]

First of all, it's important to understand that Google does not penalise you for duplicate products, it penalises you for duplicate pages, Google evaluate a page's content in its entirety. So if you had every page of your site divided into 10 areas of text and two of those areas was the same text on all pages, but the other 8 areas were unique to that page, that would not be a duplicate page.

Remember Google does not take an individual product or piece of text off a page and show the rest, it either returns the page in its entirety or removes it. By penalise what we actually mean is that Google chooses to remove one of the pages if it perceives duplicate content. It usually drops the newest page - so there is no penalty as such, at worst they will choose not to show pages that you have recently created, even if they do, the facility is put in place for our users to help them shop anyway.

None of the by brand sections that i setup ever have duplicate product pages, each duplicate links back to the master page in the main department, i always set by brand sections up to contain duplicates. I've bought some trainers this morning, so let's use those as an example:

I'd normally expect to find them in a department menu such as:

Trainers > men's trainers > product listing page showing all options, so Nike Reebok, Adidas etc. would all be together on page format something like so - http://www.quantumelectronics.co.uk/acatalog/DVD.html - in essence a page designed for men who are not after a particular brand of trainer, just want to see them all and compare and can then click through for further images and info. This kind of shopper will search for "mens trainers", so Google will look for pages with that as the subject.

I personally like Adidas trainers, so would search for something like "adidas mens trainers", this is where providing the alternate shop by brand method comes into its own as it effectively allows you to cover both types of shopper both on SEO and far more importantly your users on the site. A typical department menu such as:

Shop by brand > Adidas Sportswear > Adidas Mens Trainers > product listing page will all Adidas mens trainers. So with those two methods in place on a site, we are covering:

Trainers
Mens Trainers
Adidas Sportswear
Adidas Mens Trainers

This is just a rough example plucked form the sky, but you can begin to see the approach.

The next question is how do we provide that method on our site, firstly we'd never make that decision based on the time it will take to implement, we look at what is the best solution, will return better results and improve sales. Sadly using search string results pages is not the best, one only has to read the deluge of info on cgi-bin links not being as good as plain URLs, even thought the gap has been considerably improved recently. We don't want incoming cgi-bin links, we want plain simple URLs as the script has to be run to provide the results on a cgi-bin link. Unless you do the search hack the search results page also looks crap compared to a normally setup page. Even with the hack, i'd still prefer the normal page setup with title and breadcrumb trail etc.

Using search script created URLs has a place on very large sites for sure, if i'm running a small to medium size company for me, it is always best to take the long route.

[Clive.Aspen]

thanks for the comprehensive answer!
I can see your points.

[Fairyglass]

You can force Actinic into a psuedo dynamic tool to create dynamic pages at the desktop.

Eg for brand "Halloween" this page http://www.partyconnection.co.uk/aca...-costumes.html shows only the Halloween products without any duplicates

similarly brand = "Bangles" on http://www.paulabolton.net/acatalog/...-material.html only shows Bangles with the option to filter again (silver, coppers etc)

Jont- how is this done? I've created variables to categorise stock, but am unsure how to get the results to display. Is this something a relatively inexpert user can deal with, or more advanced?
Thanks in advance...
Ben

[NormanRouxel]

I don't know exactly how Jont did his brands but code like this (NB Pseudo Code) placed in a Fragment at the top of an empty section would do it (assuming you have a variable called Brand then this code would produce a page containing just Acme products and omitting Duplicates):

<actinic:block type="EntireSectionList">
 <actinic:block type="ProductList">
  BLOCKIF (Brand == "Acme") && (ProductType == 0)
    Product Layout
  ENDBLOCKIF
 </actinic:block>
</actinic:block>

Update: It might be better to create a Section level variable BrandsThisPage and amend the code as follows:

<actinic:block type="EntireSectionList">
 <actinic:block type="ProductList">
  BLOCKIF (Brand == BrandsThisPage) && (ProductType == 0)
    Product Layout
  ENDBLOCKIF
 </actinic:block>
</actinic:block>

Now you could use the same code on many Sections and change the Section variable BrandsThisPage per page.