This post is aimed at webmasters who have an e-commerce website which has more than one page of products. For example if your website sells Lamborghini’s and the first page of your ‘Products’ page displays 10 Lamborghini cars for sale. At the bottom of the page you might have a ‘Next’ button for the visitor to move onto the second page of Lamborghini cars for sale.
So should you do anything special to help out the search engines to index these pages? Well you don’t need to but we think if there is anything you can do to help the search engines index your website then why not help them.
Research has shown that visitors to websites prefer to land on the page which displays all the products (view all) in one continuous list than one of the ‘pages’ which only displays 10 products. Therefore Google has decided to give these pages more priority when it comes to indexing. If Google are going to prioritise these pages then why not help them along the way. There are a few bits of HTML you can use to do this. Using the rel=’next’ and rel=’prev’ link codes will help group these pages together and along with a session ID Google will know which page is connected to which. Using the rel=’canonical’ tag will direct the link juice to the full product list, which in turn will help that page rank better.
Googles webmaster team have created this in depth video explaining your options and it is worth the watch. We have created a SEO lesson section to our website, why not have a look!
If you have any questions about optimising e-commerce websites or about this video please get in contact.