Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
For a number of years now, google has indexed a few hundred of my shop pages as deeplinks, very comfortable for my customers, because they are lead directly to the relevant product group. The structure of these deeplinks goes like
mydomain/myproducts/pages/blue/metal/square/widgets.html
Each page covers between five to twenty items. It seems as if google never thought these were mere doorway-pages, because the folder names are well chosen and cover highly relevant embracing-terms of the semantic cloud around the specific product group.
I like that long-tail thing. Two weeks ago I received an excellent CD from one of my suppliers with another 4000 products and good images, which I imported into my database. Because this supplier manages to deliver his stuff within two days, I designed a new branch in my shop-system along the lines of
mydomain/myproducts/pages/order-on-demand/supplierX/H/Highly-uncompetitive-widgets.html
Most of these new products are indeed highly uncompetitive and thus of high value for the searcher, but it would have taken months to define concise folder-names other than this alphabetical grouping. The number of products listed and the number of shop-deeplinks doubled within one day. Two days after that I designed a specific shop-sitemap in addition to my google-sitemap.xml in order to add a two-node-linkstructure from the main page to all these old and new shop-deeplinks.
If I now perform a search for "highly-uncompetitive-widget", google does show that shop-sitemap on spot #8, because the word "highly-uncompetitive-widget" appears there as anchor text. The new shop-pages themselves, however, are nowhere to be found, although that page even covers "highly-uncompetitive-widget" as title, within its description, as on-page-text, image-alt-text etc etc.
I defined priority 0,8 for the shop-sitemap in my google-sitemap.xml and 0,5 for the shop-pages.
I thought of abandoning that complicated folder-structure and change it into
mydomain/myproducts/order-on-demand-supplierX-H-Highly-uncompetitive-widgets.html
but doing that I would not concentrate on the user but on the search engine and thus violate googles first law. An URL is an URL is an URL and the difference shouldn't really matter.
Should I just wait because of that priority figures? or
Have I trapped into an unnatural growth filter? and if yes
Is such alphabetical grouping more likely to trigger such a filter?
Is it normal that such a filter only affects parts of a site?
sorry for the long post.
Has introducing these pages meant that you are now carrying duplicate content? Your older pages had 5-20 items per page; that's often more Google-friendly than one item per page, especially if those pages are brief and off-the-shelf.
What is not at all clear to me is whether these pages are actually any use to your site? Do they bring any business - or are they diverting visitors away from more useful areas?
Either way, I've never heard any reason for google to have an alphabet phobia - and one of my sites uses a similar system with no pain at all!
[edited by: Quadrille at 10:00 pm (utc) on July 26, 2006]
My best-sellers on the web cover product-groups I never would have thought of, if I had designed the whole site from top to bottom via concise keyword-analysis. Instead, quite often in the past five years visitor requests came rather more "by accidence," because mine was more or less the only site on the web covering those search terms. I hope one or two of these 400 pages will reveal some additional, promising bulges in my niche, worth to be elaborated further; for the benefit of those customers, who had been searching for theses things in vain in the past.
Yesterday I saw that my sitemaps account has a big green bar with "pagerank not yet calculated." I assume this means these pages will be indexed within a few days or weeks.
