Is this keyword stuffing or not?

[potato95]

We have a site where widgets are added to the cart with urls rather than through form submission. So we may have a list of products with "add to basket" urls on the page such as...

Green Widget Size 1 ADD TO CART (<-- Link)
Green Widget Size 2 ADD TO CART (<-- Link)
Green Widget Size 3 ADD TO CART (<-- Link)
Green Widget Size 4 ADD TO CART (<-- Link)
etc...

The ADD TO CART urls is set to no-follow in the robots.txt

"Green Widget" is obviously one of our keyphrase targets for the SEs. Do you think it is possible that we may get penalized for "keyword stuffing" on the pages as we are repeating our target keywords like this? This approach was done to make it easier for our customers and as such we believw it is successful.

If it is likely to get us penalized then is there a way to say to bots "don't read this section", I assume not.

Thoughts appreciated.

[edited by: pageoneresults at 3:36 pm (utc) on April 2, 2007]
[edit reason] Delinked ADD TO CART examples. [/edit]

[wolfadeus]

Think of the user first: Does it look spammy or natural?

[potato95]

The layout was designed to be very user friendly and instead of having a "classic" drop-down list of products attached to a form we decided to lay the products out on the page where we can show stock info ie. clearly show to the customer what is or is not in stock. Along side each item is the Add To Basket link.

We have started to worry about this because we think we should be ranking on the likes of "Green Widget" and don't whereas we do rank on certain phrases which are not actually as relevant to our site and are more competetive.

This layout is done with a series of divs and the text is taken from the stockitem description. So, as in our case, if you sell lots of widgets that differ only in a minor way eg size, or colour then you inevitably get repeating descriptions of them throughout the site.

One family of widgets we sell consists of thirty members each on their own web page where they can be bought. On each web page there are then 10 widget sub-variations. So that is 30x10 portions of text with very, very similar content.

So on one page you might have..

Green Widget Size 1 ADD TO CART (<-- Link)
Green Widget Size 2 ADD TO CART (<-- Link)
Green Widget Size 3 ADD TO CART (<-- Link)
Green Widget Size 4 ADD TO CART (<-- Link)
etc...

On the next page...

Red Widget Size 1 ADD TO CART (<-- Link)
Red Widget Size 2 ADD TO CART (<-- Link)
Red Widget Size 3 ADD TO CART (<-- Link)
Red Widget Size 4 ADD TO CART (<-- Link)
etc...

and so on.

Might the fact that we also add items to the cart with a url (as opposed to a form) also be a factor as google can see the urls but is banned from following them?

Thanks

[ken_b]

I don't have an ecomm site, but I can directly relate to that kind of list.

I use it on about 25 category pages that each hold somewhere between 17 and 150 keyword loaded links in lists like you describe, so they link to a combined total of about 1,200 pages that would be product pages on an ecomm site).

My site is 7 years old, has used this system from the start, has come through every Google update and change in fine shape and as far as I can tell hasn't suffered any negative effects from using lists of keyword loaded links like that.

In fact, in the most recently some of those category pages are actually ranking better than some of the pages they link to. That may or may not be desirable, but it doesn't seem to have hurt me overall.