How important is the depth of a page?

Does Google care?

[AprilS]

I have a question pertaining to the depth of a page and how Google will perceive and rank it. We currently have over 3,000 pages on our site, mostly products...and lets say for example I do a search on Google for "Blue Dot Widget"... and we appear in the number 3 postion....not too bad..but then again..the customer would have to type in the exact name. What seems wierd is that a lot of of our product pages don't have a PR with Google.

Our main page has a PR of 5/10 and many other pages have a 4/10. Does google give pages a lower PR if it has to dig deeper within a site for the page? Google gives most of our product pages a PR of 0/10 even though we have a very good keyword density.

With our products, most of them a user or bot will have to drill down 4 levels (click on four links) to get to a product description...main site...main catalog..category..sub category...product description.

I'm curious if it would be beneficial (for better rankings with google) if I made a single page with a link to every single product we have. I would tell the google bot not to index that page but follow the links. I would make it so the bot would find the link to this "product listing" from our main page...just a generic link that most people wouldn't see - like a ".".

This is the only thing I can think to do to get our indiviual product pages a higher PR...cause the products that we directly link to from our homepage have a PR of 4/10.

[CCowboy]

I have found that after time Google will spread out page rank more evenly if I have a good site map and I also have links form higher PR pages pointing to other pages besides my index or site map. Try getting a few more inbound links from sites with PR6 or better to point to other pages than those mentioned above.

[Morgan]

Also, just a reminder, PageRank has nothing to do with keyword density.

[Mohamed_E]

I'm curious if it would be beneficial (for better rankings with google) if I made a single page with a link to every single product we have.

Think of it as a site map, which is very useful to both humans and bots. See the Google Information for Webmasters [google.com] where they advise:

Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.

[AprilS]

So, its not bad to have a site map with over 3,000 links on it? Will Google go through the whole list or only do partial since there are so many links? I thought I read on a previous post that its best not to list all links...could someone clarify.

I wouldn't really make the site map for our customers as it is VERY easy to browse our site...looking at a page of 3,000+ links would be for the unusual shopper and for robots....I would think.

As far as getting someone with a PR6 (as CCowboy) suggested. This isn't too practicle as we want to increase the PR of all of our product pages...and it would be quite difficult to find a site with our subject matter that isn't a competitor.

[dougmcc1]

April, I'm guessing with that many pages that you're site is database driven. Since your product pages have a PR0, they are probably not being crawled. This might be due to long URL's which use special characters such as?=& etc. Also, it may be due to your product pages being more than 3 levels deep. Perhaps you might be better off using subdomains. Your sitemap could then list all your subdomains. Each subdomain (category) could have it's own site map (product listing).

Does google give pages a lower PR if it has to dig deeper within a site for the page?

Typically, yes. But if other websites link to one of your internal pages, that page could in fact have a higher PR than your index.

[AprilS]

dougmmc1,

Actually, every single one of our product pages has been crawled and continues to be crawled (thank goodness). I have verified this by making sure they are in the Google index.

You're correct, our site is database driven for our products, but we're able to pass variables in the URL w/out the use of &,?,etc... so it is actually very friendly.

I'm just trying to how to get these product pages our of the PR0 hole. For example...if we sold "Tight blue shiny widget" may be be on page 1 #3 on a result page for Google....but none of our competitors are using that product name in their meta tags, page title, etc. So..it seems like we're doing things correctly with each individual product...it would seem that we should AT least get a PR1...thats why the only thing I can think of is Google minusing (sp?) a PR for each level it has to go down into our site. :S

[dougmcc1]

With our products, most of them a user or bot will have to drill down 4 levels (click on four links) to get to a product description...main site...main catalog..category..sub category...product description.

If it takes 4 clicks to get to the page and your index is a PR5, then yeah that page is probably going to have a PR of 0 because you'll lose PR for each click away from the index.

As Morgan was saying, PR has nothing to do with how well optimized a page is. Google doesn't literally assign PR to a page. It gets passed on from other pages.

Sounds like you need to restructure your site if you want to assign your product pages PR.

[2_much]

I would create a whole section of site map pages, with about 90 links per page. You'll end up with about 35 new pages. Then create an index page with a list of links to all those pages, and interlink them between each other. Then link to the index of all those pages from your index page and if possible from the main navigation pages. That might help.