Pagination for half a million webpages

[financialhost]

I need to create a pagination system for a website with around 500,000 pages of products.

I know it will be hard for Google to spider all of them but would you agree that this is probably the best way to do it?

Previous 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10, 100+, 1000+, 10,000+, 100,000+ Next


It is a lot of pages i know.

[goodroi]

No, I would not agree that is the best way.

I would suggest you break these products into categories (plastic widgets, metal widgets, wood widgets). Then break those categories into smaller subcategories (red plastic widgets, blue plastic widgets, etc.).

I would also suggest you take a step back and ask yourself if these 500k product pages each contain significant & unique value? If they do not have unique value then it might make sense to block a large amount of these pages to avoid Google thinking your site is low quality and penalizing it.

[financialhost]

I do also intend to break these products into categories and sub categories and they are all unique products.

For the main page i need pagination for all the products and can't think of any other way to create the pagination in that section.

[tedster]

Why does the main page need to have a connection to pagination? The usual would be just to link the home page to the main categories in the product taxonomy - with some good, overall home page text saying why anyone would want to choose this business over any other in the same market.

[walkman]

You may want to consider to maybe adding a related feature with 3-5 related products /pages but pagination for 500,000 items is not going to do it. The main page is not going to help you much with 500K items, even if you have 1000 link pages it means having 500 links from the main page. Both are major no-nos IMO.

[lexipixel]

<<- 1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10 ... 499999|500000 ->>

With that said, 1 day = 86,400 seconds... so if someone only spent 1 second on each page clicking through the pagination, it would take them nearly 6 days to "browse" the site that way.

And your reason for wanting to do it was....?

[financialhost]

Only a small percentage of products are being indexed - so it is to enable search engines to find them all.

Currently there is no search engine friendly pagination for search engines to find them.

It does seem overkill - maybe i should limit pagination to just the categories and sub categories but even then - some categories would have over 100,000 pages (and that is even when i place 50 products per page).

There is actually over 30 million products.

[lexipixel]

Probably better to create XML site maps.

[walkman]

financialhost, there is not a good way to use the home page effectively other than to link to dozens of top categories. That's the reality and then you can interlink categories or individual pages. Google will pick and choose how much of the 30 million to index anyway

[Robert Charlton]

I suggest taking a look at this thread...

For Mega-Site SEO, Structure is King - not Content
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4238574.htm [webmasterworld.com]