themes with an eccomerce site - how?

[tonywm]

Hi - I've read the post below on themes and it's *very* helpful. My question is slightly different.
Our home page represents 4 distinct businesses categories:
- church candles
- church furniture
- church furnishings
- vestments
They all link into a shopping cart product called Actinic Catalog.

I'd like to beef up our flagging search engine performance and re-structure our web site using the ideas discussed here about themes.

So, I want folks to go to the catalog, but spiders to go through my themed links. Does anyone have any ideas on how to do this - from the point of view of organising the links?

Tony.

[WebGuerrilla]

Hi tonywm,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld

One way to deal with a situation like yours is to generate atatic versions of your catalog pages, and then re-publish them using a subdomain structure similar to the layout that was talked about in the recent theme thread.

If you were to browse through your catalog and save all your candle pages, you could put them up as

[candles.yourchurchproducts.com...]

For the home page of this subdomain, you could use a search results page that dispalyed results for candles.

The amount of work involved will depend a lot on how your shopping cart is setup. If your site uses relative urls, you will probablly have to spend some time editing the pages to get all your images and cart buttons to work, but alot of times, you can just do a few global "find and replace."

Once you have your static pages grouped by topic, you just need to link them together from your homepage. I personally like to use CSS to create non-visible links to the spider subdomains. I'll also put up a robots.txt file that will prevent them from crawling any of the content on the main site. That way, when the crawl the home page, the only links available for them are the subdomains that contain th optimized product pages grouped by topic.