Will my site structure provide decent SEO?
-
We have an ASP.NET MVC website with a view that can dynamically display each product we offer. The product name is hyphenated in the URL, and this is what we’re using to pull the product from the database. So an example URL would be: http://www.mysite.com/Products/Florida/Sample-Product-Name
We have another view that dynamically lists the products offered for each state. This page would contain links to the URL for each product offered in that state. The URL for Florida would be: http://www.mysite.com/Products/Florida
We want to make sure that when we enter a new product into the database, the product is indexed by Google the next time our site is crawled. I know that Google will crawl through the links in our website, so the new product should get indexed as long as we have a link to it. In this case, the link will be on the view that lists the products for the corresponding state.
I have 2 questions:
1) Is my understanding correct that Google will index the product page as long as it can find a link to it somewhere in my site?
3) To get Google to index each URL for content that is generated dynamically from a database, is having links in my site for each URL the only way to do it? Is there something we can do with the site map?
Thanks in advance everyone!
-Alex
-
While you can get all pages indexed via a sitemap, the general rule of thumb is that if Google has to use your sitemap to find the page, it will probably never rank for anything. Good internal link architecture will be your best friend here. What we generally recommend is to "link early, link often".
On every product page, plan on linking to several other products before you get to the footer of the page. Some common methods of this are...
Top Products
Related Products
Recently Added Products
People who bought this also bought...
Recently Sold Products
Featured Products
Recently Visited Productsetc...
Any excuse to get more links to more pages. For example, let's say you sell 10,000 products and your goal is to have no product page be more than 3 clicks away from the homepage...
Click 1: The homepage links to 50 product pages (Top 20 Products, 10 Latest Added, 10 Featured, 10 Recent Purchases)
Click 2: These product pages each link to another 30 (10 Latest Added, 10 Also Bought, 10 Recent Purchases) (remember, Google will spider the site asynchronously so when it comes back the latest, featured and recent should have changed)
Click 3: These product pages also link to another 30 (10 Latest Added, 10 Also Bought, 10 Recent Purchases).If this were perfectly random, you could potentially have links to 45,000 products. However, assuming there is some crossover (ie: google visits a products page and you havent added any new ones since the last page they visited), it is reasonable to believe that Google will find at least 1 link to all 10,000.
Note: use the "featured" listing to get things indexed. Feature products that havent been spidered yet by google.
-
1. This is the principle although not a given. A good deal of this depends on your sites trust, trusted sites are crawled into far more detail than low trust sites.
2. You could possibly add each new product's url to the site map or alternatively submit each new url to the search engines (this only takes about 30seconds anyway). It is good practice to have an up-to-date sitemap to include all site pages that you would like indexed.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Manufacturer, New Direct-to-Consumer Site (Separate Site, or Sub-Domain?)
Hi All! Working with an established manufacturer, been around for many years, it's an internationally known brand, and their products are sold by thousands on distributors. They recently started a new website (separate from their old established B2B manufacturer site) which will be used to sell direct to customer. The new site is great, with a nice responsive design, clean look, flexible, etc. The problem is, it's a new site with low Domain Authority. The manufacturer's B2B site has been around a while, very high Domain Authority. So, I'd like to be able to harness all the link equity they've build instead of trying to optimize a brand new site. The problem with this old established site is that it IS in fact old. The design is terrible, it's not responsive, old code, bad look and feel, etc. We could incorporate the new B2C site (which has its own CMS) into a sub-domain, like store.site.com. But, I'd worry that site.com's crapiness will limit growth potential for the new pages at store.site.com. Same issue were we to add the new site into a sub-folder, like site.com/store/. On the other side, we could just keep the new site, with it's own domain, sitestore.com, and have product pages and/or category pages from the manufacturer's B2B site link to the relevant pages on the new B2C site. Thanks!
Web Design | | fiberglass0 -
SSL, SEO, and Site Migration question
When migrating a site to a new url and one where the old url had no https and the new url will be full https does it matter if the 301 redirect points at http://thisisthenewsite.com ? Meaning, should the new site have the ssl / https up prior to redirecting the old site? Does it matter if you redirect the old site to http://thisisthenewsite.com or https://thisisthenewsite.com? Since the site will force to https anyway?
Web Design | | Atlanta-SMO0 -
Google tag manager on blocked beta site - will it phone home to Google and cause site to get indexed?
We want to develop a beta site, in a directory with the robots.txt blocking bots. We want to include the Google Tag Manager tags and event layer tracking code on this beta site. My question is that by including the Google Tag Manager code, that phones home to Google, will it cause Google to index this beta site when we don't want it indexed?
Web Design | | CFSSEO0 -
Does having a Blog link in the top level navigation provide any better SEO value, or would having it in a footer or top navigation work just as good?
Trying to decide on whether placing a link to the blog in our top level navigation would have a better SEO value than just placing it in top or footer navigation. I have an ecommerce site.
Web Design | | RPD0 -
On site SEO opinions
Hi all, I have been testing different configurations for my on-site SEO for a while now and I think I am pretty much there. However it is always nice to know what other SEO's think about my keyword density and usage. My site is http://www.tomlondonmagic.com I am curious as to what you think regarding landing page content, whether you need lots or text or little text? I have just removed links in the text as I feel I want to keep as much juice on my landing page as possible. Thanks all!
Web Design | | TomLondon0 -
Website URL Structures - Which does Google prefer or does it matter?
Which URL structure does google prefer..............OR DOES IT REALLY MATTER? Option A www.example.com/services/service#1 - this is the default that wordpress uses Option B www.example.com/service#1
Web Design | | webestate0 -
Need help to implement microdata/microformat for ecommerce site
**Can somebody please help me to implement microdata/microformats codes for our ecommerce product pages? **
Web Design | | EastEssence22
Please guide me if you have some CSS example for the same. Thanks.0 -
How many sites on one hosting account?
How many sites is safe to house on one hosting provider? I use BlueHost and they advertise unlimited domains, but I'm not sure what the negative side effects might be from hosting too many on one hosting service. If it matter at all, I'm using WordPress to build my sites. Pros and Cons?
Web Design | | leafndrop0