Shop By Brand Pages: A Good Or Bad Idea?

[Planet13]

Hi there, Everyone:

I would like to know if it is a good idea for SEO to add new Shop By Brand pages to a site that doesn't have a lot of page rank or inbound links.

I have about 180 pages on my ecommerce site. I am thinking about adding about five or six new Sub-Category Pages (two clicks away from the home page) that would be shop by brand pages.

The structure would look something like this:

Shop By Brand (a main category - one click from home page)
- Brand X Widgets
- Brand Y widgets
- Brand Z Widgets

All of the products in those subcategories already belong in different categories, meaning that they can already be navigated to by a different path (usually one more click away from the home page).

The benefit would be that Brand X Widgets is a more popular term than the current term than those products are under. so if I could rank well for that, the benefits would be there.

The drawbacks are that I rank well for the sub-subcategory that the product is already in (which gets significantly less queries in google). Also, I don't have a whole lotta' link love, and I am concerned about spreading my page rank even thinner. And finally, I am worried that the new content on the Brand X Widgets, Brand Y widgets, etc., would not be SIGNIFICANTLY different from what other content might already be on the other sub-subcategory pages.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[goodroi]

With the Panda/Farm update this has become a more complex situation. Historically webmasters could throw up large amounts of low quality pages to target the numerous long tail keywords. Now Google has said that having a significant amount of low quality pages can hurt the rankings for the entire site.

If you are going to add these brand pages make sure to add content and build out these pages. Talk about the strengths & weakness for each brand. Mention their top sellers and what people say about the brand. I wouldnt just upload a brand page with less than 200 words.

[Planet13]

Thank you, goodroi:

I will think about what you said and see if there is a way to really add some benefit to users.

[FranticFish]

For the latest site I'm doing the client has put down as a requisite the facility to filter all categories by brand name; he says that it is very important.

As far as I can tell no-one actually searches for the brands in Google (i.e. 'brand x widget'), but when they're in his shop or on the phone more often than not they ask for certain branded products. It's a trade site and the products are pretty generic so perhaps certain brands are tried, tested and preferred.

[Planet13]

As far as I can tell no-one actually searches for the brands in Google (i.e. 'brand x widget'), but when they're in his shop or on the phone more often than not they ask for certain branded products.

do you mean that specifically for the types of products he sells that no one searches for brand x widget?

Because for the types of stuff we sell (apparel) there are MANY more searches for "brand x clothing" then for a sub-category, such as "brand x dresses" - even though the brand in this case is known particularly for their dresses (they have 200 styles of dress, and only like a dozen styles of shirts, a dozen jackets, four styles of pants, etc.,).

so I am guessing that each particular category might vary in terms of # of queries in google.

[FranticFish]

It's a B2B supply site for fairly boring stuff every business needs. People just search for 'niche supplies' to find a supplier but once they have found them they ask for 'Acme widgets'. These are not very web savvy people on the whole. I say 'no-one' what I mean is 'negligible'.

[g1smd]

Do make sure that the product pages each retain a single URL irrespective of what category page you get to it from.