Sections, Products and SEO

[leehack]

I'm bored with doing mind numbing product photography

Get touting for a ladies underwear site, i'm sure the boredom would pass.

[Mike Hughes]

I know what you mean about SEO and it is a grey area, but take this thread for example. He's had advice off 3 people, all different:
Change the ratio of content between listing pages and product pages
Completely block the page
Block the page is best, but why do this, be happy with what you've got
It really is no wonder that confusion reigns supreme on SEO.
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There's no reason for SEO to be confusing. All anybody who runs their own site needs to know is the same basic stuff it's always been. Pages are mainly ranked by a combination of 1. Content and 2. Importance (pseudo measured by link strength).

The differring advice this guy got was because he asked a specific question about how to block a page and was given the answer to that question. Malcolms answer was 100% correct which is why I agreed with it but also pointed out that was a pretty daft thing to do.

Section pages will often do better than product pages because even though the product pages might have better content, their importance is lower. This is because of the way most sites are structured. The home page is seen as the most important because this is where all the external links point to. As you navigate through each step of the sites structure the link strength diminishes to the point where pages that are several steps away from the home page are seen as unimportant and often ignored by the search engines. A site map can help here as then every page is only 2 steps way from the home page (as Malcolm pointed out right near the start of this thread).

All anybody needs to do for SEO is to make each page do as well as it can. Have the right content and try to get some external links. Playing around with blocking certain pages is most likely going to do more harm than good.

Mike

[johngwms]

Phew!

I thought I'd let you all cool down a little before clarifying.

Lee is correct, I need my SERPs to point to a product page. If a customer is searching for a specific product he needs to go to the product page, not the listing (Section Page) above.

However, if he is searching for a product type then the listing page would be more useful.

This has clarified matters for me - thank you all. I will organise my SEO to include generic Keywords and Phrases in the Section Page and specific Keywords and phrases on each product page. I don't think that excluding Section Pages from the spidering process would help in the grand scheme of things, although it may raise the ranking of my product pages.

I was initially confused as I was under the (incorrect) impression that product pages were not indexed in the same way as Section Pages. It seems from what is being said that they are.

John

[Mike Hughes]

I don't think that excluding Section Pages from the spidering process would help in the grand scheme of things, although it may raise the ranking of my product pages.

There's no reason to think that excluding one page from the index will cause another one to rise. It doesn't work that way as they're all ranked on their own merit.

I was initially confused as I was under the (incorrect) impression that product pages were not indexed in the same way as Section Pages. It seems from what is being said that they are.

Correct. It's only the pop-up pages (i.e. extended info pages) that aren't ideal for doing well in the search engines.

Mike

[leehack]

If anything John, blocking your listing pages would have a considerable detrimental effect on your product pages, as those will be your only 'internal' pages that link to those product pages. Without them, there is no internal linking apart from the sitemap. I'd be amazed if that did not cause far more harm than good.

[Stereo Steve]

You just need different and unique text on the section page. There will be less of it per product probably so the SPP page should rank higher for searches realted to it. Of course, saying this is very different to finding the time to actually write unique text. It's hard work (see other thread re dup content).