Questions
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Too many on page links
First off, it's more of a balancing act than a hard/fast rule. I wrote a post about the 100 links "limit" last year, just for reference: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many Generally, though Expand Online is right - tests seem to show that Google ignores the 2nd, 3rd, etc. link to any Page B from Page A. While we still count those individual links, it shouldn't pose major problems for internal link-juice flow. Google consolidates them, for the most part. It may not be 100%, but it's close enough that you're probably ok in most cases. It can be very situational, though. In practice, I find the additional links are sometimes unnecessary or even confusing for visitors, so pruning them down is always worth reviewing. I wouldn't create one mega-link, though - it can behave funny cross-browser, and it'll create odd-looking anchor text. If it's a choice of that or leaving things alone, I'd leave things alone.
Technical SEO Issues | | Dr-Pete0 -
E-commerce categrory out of stock items
Hello Richard, That is a great question and I'm impressed by your attention to detail with regard to page-rank distribution changing as things go in and out of stock. To answer your question, I don't think you risk being penalized for displaying in this way any more than thousands of other sites, including huge brands, risk it by using drop-down divs (e.g. "read more" , "transcript") and tabbed product description areas (e.g. "sizes", "description", "technical details", "Shipping costs") to break up the pertinent information into bite-sized chunks for the user. I work on a site that has checkboxes the user can uncheck to hide certain items if they don't wish to see them. This all uses similar coding to what you have described. As long as you never specifically target Google (as in say "If Googlebot, then show this content, else show this other content) I think you'll be fine. With that said, you may want to look into using a View-All rel canonical page to take care of that page-rank distribution issue you mentioned, depending on how it impacts the load-time of the page and how many links you will be sending part of your page-rank to: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html . If it were me I'd just stick to the solution you first asked about, but there are plenty of options. Also think about the UX when a visitor lands on the out-of-stock product page. All it takes is a few quality raters or a few hundred organic visitors who land on that page while it's out of stock to give it a bad rating or a fast back-click to the SERPs and you could find yourself battling the effects of Panda, at least as far as I understand the process. Some options to improve that user experience include: Estimated date that the product will come back; ability to backorder; ability to sign up for an email alert when it gets back in stock; related product links with images. Good luck! Everett
Technical SEO Issues | | Everett0