E-commerce site structure & link juice: Bouncing off an idea

[Peter85]

Hi guys,

Question from a new-comer in SEO. Summary of the situation:

• potential customers are searching for a generic product category (buy mountainbike) more often than a brand in that category (Specialized MTB).
• And the latter is searched more often than a specific product ('some specific product from Specialized brand').
• Both the brand pages and product pages are not ranking good

Then would it be a good idea to have the category pages only link to the brand pages? They may show the products, but the links wouldn't pass link juice. I'm not even sure if that is technically possible, but I wanted to figure out the merit first.

I'm hoping this would support the brand pages to rank better as they take in more volume. Please do feel free to teach me!

[GregB123]

Hi Peter. Maybe I'm reading your description wrong, but it sounds like a pretty standard ecommerce arrangement.

Is the following true?

Search Volume (ranked highest to lowest):

1. Generic Products (mountainbike, commuter bike, racing bike, etc)
2. Product Brands (Schwinn mountainbike, Trek mountainbike, Hurley mountainbike, etc)
3. Brand Models (Scwhinn 851, Schwinn 3400, Schwinn 4xtc, etc)

Page linking plan in question:  ( >>> means links going to a collection of pages)

Generic Product page >>> Product Brand pages

Product Brand page >>> Brand Model pages

Although this is a pretty typical ecommerce arrangement, I personally think it is not the best plan for sites only selling a few products. When there are only a few products I think it is better to go straight from the Home page to the specific product pages.

[Chris_CM]

Hi Peter,

Like Gregory said, this is a fairly standard arrangement for large ecommerce sites.  Regarding the passing of link juice, you can use NoFollow links to cut off the flow of link juice and concentrate the flow towards a few pages that you want to rank.  However, be careful about using too much NoFollow linking internally because you want to make sure your site gets crawled properly.

Hope this helps,

Chris

[danatanseo]

I agree with Gregory that this is a very typical ecommerce scenario. It's also very common to see the search volume greater for the generic terms and then less and less as things become more specific (down to specific models of bikes, for example).  I disagree with Chris' suggestion regarding the use of the "nofollow" attribute, here's a Matt Cutts video explaining why: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022462.html  -  Matt Cutts reiterates, point blank, "I would not 'nofollow' internal links." [Period]

I would take a long hard look at the brand and product pages and try to figure out how to make them more compelling. Do you have customer reviews? Are they being cultivated (i.e. collected, posted, requested...regularly)? Are your product pages getting social shares? If not, spend some time cultivating that. Without seeing one of the pages, my best guess is that there are 5-10 things that you could do right away to make those pages stickier and more compelling. Do that. Don't waste your time trying to sculpt PageRank.

Just my 2 cents! Hope it's a little helpful.

Dana

[Chris_CM]

To clarify, my comment was not a suggestion, just a description of what is technically possible given Peter's original post. Hence my warning about using nofollow extensively for internal links.

Regards,

Chris

[Peter85]

Thanks for your answers.

It's definitely a normal situation. However, in the current situation the category page shows the product, each product box contains a link to the product page.

So a category page with 50 products will have 50 links plus links to other categories in the menu and so on.

[Peter85]

Thanks a lot Dana. And thank you for going beyond the question.

We offer vouchers for writing a review, but there's only a handfull of reviewed products per category.

Where could I find inspiration to make our brand & product pages more compelling? I can't make the question more specific atm as there is still a lot in the "I don't know that I don't know" quadrant

[GregB123]

I'm still a little confused. Perhaps because we are thinking of different things when we say "category page"?

I think of "category page" as a special page in the flow a customer goes thru when they start on your home page. Like this:   Home page (has links to all the categories)  >>> Category page (has links to all the products in that category) >>> Product page (has complete description and the Buy button)

So in my view, it is perfectly normal for the Category page to have a link going out to each Product page it serves. That might be 5 products or it might be 50 products.

If you feel there are too many products showing on the Category page, then you can use Sub-Categories to decrease the number of links.  Like this: Home page >>> Category page (has links to all the sub-category pages)  >>> Sub-Category page (split logically, like Men's bikes and Women's Bikes, or Under $200 and $200 to $400 and Over $400, etc)  >>> Product page

You may also want to check with your e-commerce system provider. If they don't have an arrangement that you like, there are lots of other e-commerce systems out there...