Planet13
msg:4435347 | 5:54 pm on Mar 30, 2012 (gmt 0) |
My first question is whether you can narrow yoiur categories down even further, so that there is really only less than 12 products per category (and hence, less than 12 products per page and NO pagination required).
I think this is more helpful as a shopper; I simply HATE pagination as a user.
I would personally like a better category tree navigation so I can drill down to the exact category more quickly.
I know it is harder and harder to rank for longtail nowadays, but I still think it is better to have more tightly focused categories wherever possible. (Although i would very much like to hear the opinions of others about this.)
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SnowMan68
msg:4435387 | 7:37 pm on Mar 30, 2012 (gmt 0) |
This is a good question. I have been wondering the same thing because I see sites like Overstock that have hundreds and hundreds of products listed on one single category page.
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deadsea
msg:4435391 | 7:42 pm on Mar 30, 2012 (gmt 0) |
I've removed pagination from several large sites because:
1. Referral traffic to pages 2+ was very low
2. Users tended not to use them
3. It added tons of crawlable pages which needed significant server resources to support
4. Pagination made the UI look cluttered
5. It is easier for developers not to have to support them.
As a result, page 1 usually picks up enough referrals to offset the 1-2% of referrals that used to come into page 2+. However, I have never seen a large up-tick in overall traffic from pagination removal.
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wingslevel
msg:4435413 | 9:09 pm on Mar 30, 2012 (gmt 0) |
as a general rule, you should try to sort the products in order of sales popularity.
whichever way you go with pagination, this will be better.
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brinked
msg:4435442 | 10:55 pm on Mar 30, 2012 (gmt 0) |
I have explored this as well. My pages that had pagination seem to have always been taking a hit. What I did was implement ajax to load more results, not pagination ajax but a "view more results" so the results will just keep scrolling vertically which is more user friendly anyway.
Upon implementing this about a year ago when panda was released, these pages have not seen any improvement. I can not rule this out entirely but I am pretty sure it does not have as much effect as I still see many sites ranking fine that have paging...paging does not seem to be much of an issue...but maybe the actual pages are the issue, if there are a lot of similar pages you might want to reduce the amount of similar/redundant content/listings pages you have.
hope this helps
Will
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Robert Charlton
msg:4435450 | 11:12 pm on Mar 30, 2012 (gmt 0) |
Pagination and SEO - Maile Ohye
GoogleWebmasterHelp - YouTube - Mar 8, 2012
TRT 16:36
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njn8uXTWiGg [youtube.com]
| Google's Maile Ohye examines the issues webmasters face with paginated content: paginated articles, product category listings, etc. She then explains the options available to those webmasters concerned about SEO, including rel="next" and rel="prev" HTML markup. |
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PS: To echo wingslevel, whatever else you do, definitely sort products by priority. To add a further PS, I've always felt that if a category was much too large, then some further split in categories might be appropriate.
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MelissaLB
msg:4435565 | 1:35 pm on Mar 31, 2012 (gmt 0) |
as a general rule, you should try to sort the products in order of sales popularity.
whichever way you go with pagination, this will be better. |
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Another one we've struggled with, We've had such disastrous results with changing our coding in the past that we've just left it the way it is out of fear of breaking the whole machine. Our products are basically just coded to appear alphabetically. Allowing us to tinker around with the order actually scares us a bit.
I totally agree with you, this would be the most ideal. I'm trying to make a positive change to the site with the least complex coding possible.
Thanks for all the input. I'm haivng my developer give me a rundown of how this might effect page load but so far I can't think of any good reason NOT to do this!
It was mentioned to try to get my categories down to 12 products per page. In this case it just wouldnt be possible. We're dealing with 'Licensed' products so basically, each category is a license. It's more likely that they will get bigger rather than smaller.
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