Ecommerce category page with lots of links, is this bad?

[Luxoria]

My custom ecommerce category page consists of 120 image links to products listed in the store. The image links have appropriate alt/title tags with the products name (products names are short like, Airplane, Alien, Ampersand, Anchor, et cetra). The top of the page consists of a three sentence blurb about the products below.

<snip>

The product names are not the keywords the site overall targets.

I am concerned how Google will view this page in terms of SEO. Will it seem stuffed because of the amount of links versus content? Or will Google know this is a menu page of a sort?

Thanks!

[edited by: aakk9999 at 2:41 am (utc) on Aug 8, 2013]
[edit reason] ToS, removed link to screen shot [/edit]

[aakk9999]

The top of the page consists of a three sentence blurb about the products below.

Google will probably see your category page as product listing page, but it may not understand what the product category is about.

Is it possible that the text on the page is better than the three sentence blurb? Can you add a bit more relevant text that would explain to visitors (and Google) what this category is about, which would help Google classify and possibly rank your page for this category? If you yourself say the text is blurb, do you expect Google to get it as something valuable to be used to rank the page?

With regards to links, 120 products listed on one page is quite a lot for visitors too - perhaps you could either introduce pagination or alternatively split the products into sub-categories if possible.

[Luxoria]

Thank you for the suggestions.

For presentation I want to keep the word count down due to the minimalistic styling of the website. However, I may be able to add a few more relevant sentences to the top area.

Concerning breaking the products into separate subcategories, the products are all rather similar and I don't want to add extra clicks in order for visitors to view them all. However, I could add a menu to separate by subcategory if the viewer gets overwhelmed.

Concerning pagenation, when this area was switched from pagenation (5 separate pages) to a single page, the bounced rate dropped for this area of the site.

Also, when looking at the analytics visitors click the bottom products almost as much as they click the top products.

My intention is not to rank this page, but I don't want it to drag the overall site down.

Does the forums support an attachment function for screenshots?

Thanks.

[aakk9999]

My intention is not to rank this page, but I don't want it to drag the overall site down.

If it is not important to rank this category page and your only concern is about the page dragging the site down, then I would suggest that you consider adding meta robots noindex to this page with perhaps only changing what you call the "blurb" text on top to be more useful for your visitors.

In this case you do not need to invent subcategories nor do you need to introduce pagination, especially if your visitor metrics show that visitors are happy navigating the page as is.