Too many links on product pages

[BobGW]

Hello,

What do you do if there are too many links on product pages? With 18 products per page, there's 2 links per product for 120 links on many pages. There's 50 products in many categories, categories are at most 1 click from the home page.

Should we use pagination or not?

Thanks

[danatanseo]

Hi BobGW,

Honestly, I wouldn't worry about it. Google's own tests have proved that users would rather scroll through large amounts of content than move from one page to another due to latency issues. I assume you are talking about a fairly large e-commerce site. This kind of scenario is common in  e-commerce Once you add the links in the header, footer, associated products, recommended products, etc. I honestly wouldn't worry about it. However, in the interests of always improving, and if it's possible, try changing one of your category pages to using pagination, preferably one with decent traffic but lower page authority. Make the change and determine if there is any impact, positive or negative.

IMHO, I think it's better that you've kept your products higher up in the structure.

I s the only thing prompting you to think about making a change a report from Google that there are too many links on a page? Or are you thinking about changing it based on real problems with the site?

Curious to know as I am very interested in pagination issues.

Dana

[BobGW]

Hi Dana,

Thanks for the clear answer.

To answer your question, here's what's prompting my question:

I'm concerned that if Google only indexes the first 100 links then the products down below the 100th link might not get indexed.

That's the only concern

Also, although most categories have 30-50 products, one of our categories has 1200 products and I'd like to keep them all indexed. They're not broken up into categories and we've found that they're always found (even when we had them broken up) by long-tail searches.

Thank Dana.

[BobGW]

What did you think about the indexing issue, Dana?

[danatanseo]

Hi Bob,

You are welcome and I apologize for taking so long to respond here but I have the flu

I don't think you need to worry about Google stopping at 100 and not indexing the rest. As long as you have a sitemap you can always submit that via Google Webmaster Tools and Google should find everything from that. If you're site is gi-normour, you may want to submit two sitemaps, one for categories and one for products.

Also remember that you can use "Fetch as Googlebot" in GWT a certain number of times per month. If you have a new product, or a page that has siginificantly changes, this is a great way to let Google know that it would be a good idea to crawl that page. You can select that Google just looks at that one page, or crawls also all of the pages that page links to.

You can monitor your crawl and index reports in GWT. There you can see exactly how many pages out of your sitemap Google has selected to include in the index. If you are ranging at 80% or better, you are doing well. If it's below that, you might want to research duplicate content issues or other problems causing Google not to select more pages.

Hope that helps!

Dana

[BobGW]

Very helpful Dana,

Sorry you have the flu.

Get Well!

Bob