Extended Info Pages & SEO

[DavidAM]

Hi,

We've been using Actinic 8.1 for around 6 months now and have slowly built up our product catalogue and formatted the store to look the way we want it.

Our current challenge is to move things forward and become more visible throught the usual search engines.

I seem to remember reading a post here a while ago (which I can't now find!) which discussed a way of replacing the link to the Extended Info pages which confuses Google into thinking that they aren't pop-up pages and therefore Google will index these pages.

Does anyone have any info about this and will it work?

If you have time, please take a look at our website and let us know if you can think of any other issues or implications in implementing this change.

Any help will be very much appreciated.


David & Beth
www.enjoymuzic.com
enjoymuzic - The Online Music Shop

[wjcampbe]

Misleading the largest search engine is not good SEO. Better to invest the time in single product pages and then reap the benefits.

Short term you can hoodwink them, long term they will catch you out and you don't want the penalty that will follow.

[DavidAM]

Misleading the largest search engine is not good SEO. Better to invest the time in single product pages and then reap the benefits.

Short term you can hoodwink them, long term they will catch you out and you don't want the penalty that will follow.

Hi Bill,

Thanks for your reply. Not really my intention to hoodwink the search engines - I simply want them to find my products. I've tried the method of creating a separate section for each product but Actinic Business 8.1 could not cope with the number of sections. For example an upload of only 4,000 products with corresponding sub-sections was taking approx 5 hours to upload and then often crashed just before the end. I worked through this with our Actinic Designers Future Media and with Actinic Support and the only resolution was to use the extended info pages for product info. Not an experience I would like to repeat.

Do you have any alternative suggesions?

Thanks


David

[fergusw]

I seem to remember reading a post here a while ago (which I can't now find!) which discussed a way of replacing the link to the Extended Info pages which confuses Google into thinking that they aren't pop-up pages and therefore Google will index these pages.

David,
You can use the Extended info page as another page within your site using the same layout, navigation etc as your product and section pages.
You simply set the extended info page to open "in same window" and adjust the extended info page layout to include the same HTML elements for your main overall layout for the store.
As long as you have a link from your "product" to the extended info page then spiders should be able to follow these links and index the pages accordingly. (e.g. "More information")
No popup pages means Google has nothing to get confused about.

[plantsforshade]

I don't believe, from the replies I have recieved, that their are any problems with multi product pages as far as search engines are concerned we have seen the page rank raised on all our pages whether single or multi. It does matter for the google product listings eg froogle.

Regards

Nigel

[DavidAM]

I don't believe, from the replies I have recieved, that their are any problems with multi product pages as far as search engines are concerned we have seen the page rank raised on all our pages whether single or multi. It does matter for the google product listings eg froogle.

Regards

Nigel

Hi Nigel,

I was under the impression that although Google wont necessarily object to multiple product pages that the pages may not fair so well with the search engines generally because the product information text is not contained within them. However if I include the product info within these pages then they become far too long - we tried using a DIV with a scroll bar for each product info textbox but it just looked messy.

Any thoughts.



David

[DavidAM]

David,
You can use the Extended info page as another page within your site using the same layout, navigation etc as your product and section pages.
You simply set the extended info page to open "in same window" and adjust the extended info page layout to include the same HTML elements for your main overall layout for the store.
As long as you have a link from your "product" to the extended info page then spiders should be able to follow these links and index the pages accordingly. (e.g. "More information")
No popup pages means Google has nothing to get confused about.

Hi,

I have actually tried this method and it seemed to work quite well but I had trouble inserting the "add to cart" and "back" buttons in the extended info page. I also had a problem with the way that the navigation looks when doing this as I'm using a version of the norlist menu together with a breadcrumb bar and when a product was being viewed the menu didn't really seem to reflect the position in the site. I gave it up as a bad job and returned to the extended info pop-up pages.

Cheers


David

[RuralWeb]

which confuses Google

As Bill says there are no tricks you will need to do it properly to get any decent results.

[DavidAM]

As Bill says there are no tricks you will need to do it properly to get any decent results.

Okay, bad choice of words in "which confuses Google". What I really need is some opinions as to the best way to include the text of each product within my shop so that the search engines can "see" the text and use it to help with search results.

Is it the general opinion that if I am using the Extended Info page for each product then I should change the template and include it as a normal page within the site? If this is the case then can each extended info page be given its own name to reflect the product contained within and it's own meta details?

Thanks for any help.



David

[RuralWeb]

Is it the general opinion that if I am using the Extended Info page

Not by me I NEVER use the ext info pages as they cause all sorts of problems - the various methods have been discussed in depth on the forum so I suggest you consider them all before jumping in because its a pain in the arse to swap them back.

[plantsforshade]

Hi David

For large amounts of info for each product what about Norman's tabber see

http://www.drillpine.biz/v8norlist/acatalog/Books.html

Regards

Nigel

[DavidAM]

Hi David

For large amounts of info for each product what about Norman's tabber see

http://www.drillpine.biz/v8norlist/acatalog/Books.html

Regards

Nigel

Hi, Thanks for the suggestion. I've looked at this product before and it looks good but it wont do the job. The problem is more the quantity of products available in certain categories. For example our CDs category has over 100 CDs listed and even in tabbed format this would be a very long page.

I've looked into forward and back buttons to limit the number of products to 10 or 20 but this requires separate subcategories for each 10 or 20. This can't work in our case as the menu system will automatically show these sub-sections (which we don't really want to do). I considered persuading the menu not to read the last level but this idea fell apart with the problem that different sections of the website have different menu depths.

David

[fergusw]

I've looked into forward and back buttons to limit the number of products to 10 or 20 but this requires separate subcategories for each 10 or 20.

David,
I addressed this very issue here , however please note the comments of the forum members. It was felt that there may be negative SEO implications in my suggested method, although I'd say the jury is still awaiting proof of this (I'm think I read on teh forum somewhere that someone had content, hidden by CSS, indexed by Google - may be wrong though!)
It would be up to you to decide...... just an option.

[DavidAM]

David,
I addressed this very issue here , however please note the comments of the forum members. It was felt that there may be negative SEO implications in my suggested method, although I'd say the jury is still awaiting proof of this (I'm think I read on teh forum somewhere that someone had content, hidden by CSS, indexed by Google - may be wrong though!)
It would be up to you to decide...... just an option.

Hi,

This seems to be a really good idea - if the SEs dont object. The only issue I have is if the products are simply hidden does it mean that the images are loaded into the site when the page loads regardless whether they are visible? If this is the case then this option wouldn't be ideal as one of the issues I want to address is the page load time where there are lots of products.

David

[fergusw]

one of the issues I want to address is the page load time where there are lots of products.

The only sure fire way to address this is to reduce the file size of the page itself. i.e. optimise images, optimise HTML etc.

If this is a main issue for you then perhaps you might be better revisiting the "10 products per page" using different sub-section pages after all. Then you may want to look at using Actinic BlockIf contditions to control the issue you have with your menu depth levels.