With Andy MacDowell playing the role of Googlebot…

Have you ever seen the movie Mulitplicity? Do you also happen to run/manage an eCommerce website? If so, then you should know exactly what I’m referring to without even reading any further. This isn’t a signal to hit your back button now, but instead an indication that what I’m about to share with you will shed light on this important subject and how it affects all online retailers - and really any website with pagination for that matter.

Most online retailers use pagination in their product catalogs, and many don’t even understand the underlying effects of this feature. This topic is something that I’ve been performing quite a bit of research on over the past year and is near and dear to my heart. It’s a concern that not only spans SEO, but also Usability, so it is important to define a balance between those needs. (more…)

Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing Aaron Wall, of SEOBook.com, regarding the SEO issues specific to eCommerce websites. I prepared a few questions I thought would be interesting to hear his responses to:

(1) How does catalog pagination affect SEO for particular keyphrases when each page targets the same? (take 10 pages of pepsi t-shirts for example, all with different URLs for each page)

Aaron: Pagination ends up splitting PageRank across a number of pages. If you rank #5 with pagination pulling down your PageRank maybe you would rank #2 without pagination, for example.

My two cents: This is an issue that I’ve been emphasizing lately in regards to eCommerce pagination and Aaron backs up my conclusion, that pagination is a negative factor for eCommerce sites in regards to SEO. Borrowing a diagram from SEOmoz explains why dividing up the link value across multiple pages divides up the link value between all of the pages instead of focusing it on one page:

Basically what this means, is that if you had one page of Pepsi t-shirts, it would have more concentration of link value than it being spread out over 10 pages of Pepsi t-shirts.

(2) What is the recommended method of targeting keyphrases in a paginated environment? (eg. Only index page 1, use AJAX to paginate so only one URL, etc.)

Aaron: If possible (and it makes business sense) put all the content on one page. For product listing sites like an eBay or Amazon.com, I think the key is to use a sorting mechanism that places a lot of weight on your most important and best selling items. Another way around some of the pagination issues is to try to break things into as many logical precise categories as possible. Rather than kitchen maybe you break that into categories like utensils, and then break that into spoons, knives, and whatever else.

If you have multiple pages of similar content and you can get most of the best selling items on the first page then I would recommend just getting the first page indexed, and use javascript links or something like that to prevent getting the deeper pages indexed. The one exception to this rule is that you need to find a way to get most of your product level pages indexed…so perhaps you have one page of the top sellers, one page of new items, and one page that offers a comprehensive listings of items in the category. The first two (top sellers and new items) help focus PageRank on your most important items. The third (comprehensive listing) makes sure that some PageRank makes it down to your deepest articles.

My two cents: AJAX pagination has some pluses and minuses. The typical implementation that we’ve seen may fit the bill from an SEO perspective (the URL is always the same thus one page is being indexed), but they have some usability issues in that it doesn’t retain any settings for what page your currently on, or what you currently have filtered or your # of products per page. Meaning, when a user is looking at a page of products, they click on one of those products, when they go back to the main products listing, the page doesn’t know where they were originally. So you’re back at page 1 with your original settings. Aside from that, you also have to be concerned to Aaron’s point of making sure the products in the deeper pages get indexed at all, because search engines don’t crawl AJAX-ified pages (aside from the first set of content loaded - ie. page 1).

I think what would be ideal, and something I’m currently working on, is a method of loading all of the “pages” of results into divs on one physical page. Pagination would then be a matter of showing/hiding divs. The issues that are present here are that you need to control when all of the images load (only load them once the div is visible) otherwise you might have hundreds of images trying to load on page load thus slowing down page load times. Another issue concerns filtering, without some kind of server-side code, it would be very difficult to filter the resultset. All issues that I will be working through in my ideal product grid project.

(3) How important are product descriptions from an SEO standpoint? (realizing that they have value regardless from a conversion standpoint)

Aaron: If you do not have much unique text on the page (ie: no descriptions and/or using the same description as everyone else) then there is almost nothing unique on your page that will make search engines want to list that page over other competing pages. But as soon as you write unique product reviews now you have a keyword rich block of text that is unique and can start pulling in longtail traffic.

My two cents: Product descriptions provide a lot of value, and from an SEO perspective specifically they do differentiate your product pages (say you sell 50 different pepsi t-shirts) as well as your competitors. Don’t use the standard manufacturer copy!

(4) Tips to generate deep links to individual product pages

Aaron: In the second question I offered a couple tips there, in that I was suggesting you link to it yourself in proportion to its value. To encourage links from other sources you could open up an affiliate program. And if you can get the manufacturers to link to their sections on your site that helps a bunch too. I also think that consumer reviews can be segregated into hate it and like it pages…and people may be willing to link to others promoting things they like or lambasting products they do not like.

Another cool thing to do is to create tools for shopping. Amazon.com’s diamond shopper page is linkworthy because it is cool. Almost any shopping activity can be supported by how to guides or tools. We offer SEO tools on our site, and if we were to review other tools and software, perhaps we could even put lite versions or video reviews on our site to make our product review pages better than other sites. On our tools pages we often offer lengthy how to documents to help the page answer common user questions AND make it more relevant for a wide net of keywords.

My two cents: Today’s blogosphere make the job of generating product specific links a little easier. Some ideas: request a product review from a blog, join topical communities, engage with industry sites regarding specific products and niches. Let’s take our Pepsi t-shirt example again, find bloggers who focus on the food and beverage industry, or groups that love Pepsi - or even those that hate it (I’m in Atlanta - the land of Coke, so nobody likes Pepsi down here), find t-shirt review websites and blogs. Since you may sell many different brands of t-shirts, you can apply this logic to all of your brands that might span various product lines and industries. It takes time, but if done tactfully, you can generate deep product specific links to your site. I’ll have a full post about this topic in the near future as it can be quite involved.

(5) How to create “link value” to eCommerce pages besides a blog (basically, how to improve the linkability of a product page)

Aaron: Unique house editorial reviews help a lot here. Comparisons between products help. Being first to market listing the products is useful too. Rankings become somewhat self reinforcing, so if you list a product early and feature it on a “what’s new” page you may rank right out of the gate…and if a few people link at your listing then you might be able to keep that ranking as that item rotates out of your “what’s new” section. That will not happen for all products of course, but worth setting it up and hoping for the best.

I think you can learn a lot from looking at some of the large sites…like Amazon.com does so many things right.

From a smaller site perspective, debunking some of the worst products on the market (and getting links from others who hate them too)… that can float your whole site’s link trust scores. John T. Reed did a great job of that.

My two cents: It’s a lot easier to have link-worthiness in your product pages if they’re trendy, cool, fun, or exciting. The difficulty lies in the products that do not fit that category. How to add link value to those pages that maybe sell paper? This is where creativity plays in big time, create a fun video, game, or tool of some sort to add value to the page. The fact of the matter people aren’t going to get exited about (and link to) something that’s dull and boring, so one angle is to spice it up a bit with a creative spin.

(6) Importance of consistency between title and h1 tags on page

Aaron: I think they should be conceptually related, but ideally they do not exactly overlap. In our online training course ( http://training.seobook.com/) we offer a guide and excel spreadsheet showing how to make them feed off each other. Essentially what is best is that you use alternate modifiers, tenses, and even acronyms. If the page title has SEO in it then maybe the page title has search engine optimization in it. Subtle differences like plural vs singular and hyphen or no hyphen can make a difference in rankings as well.

Mixing it up generally means you are less likely to get filtered out for over-optimization AND your page is relevant for a wider array of relevant search queries.

My two cents: In addition to Aaron’s comments, using relevant and related copy between your title and h1 tags keep them different, but semantically similar and relevant as well as boosting your long tail capabilities.

(7) I’m sure in your experience you’ve come across any number of issues that might pertain particularly to eCommerce sites, so feel free to inject your own insight.

Aaron: I actually wrote like a 40 page report on some sites in that space, so I could write for a long time. But I think you covered most of the most common and biggest errors, other than perhaps URL structure, canonicalization issues, internal redirects on tracking, session issues, etc. but most of that stuff can get a bit complex and is quite site specific.

I’d like to thank Aaron for taking the time to contributing to our blog, for those of you not familiar with Aaron or SEOBook.com I encourage you to check out his site, the tools, the training, and of course, the book.

I can’t count how many times I’ve been approached by people I meet that claim to be SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experts. And more often than not, it is simply a buzzword used by most web developers and companies looking to hook someone into their business. Over time I’ve learned to be a bit skeptical whenever someone tells me that - even if they are legit. In my book, you have to prove your SEO worth - I’m not just going to take your word for it. Typically, this involves just some conversation on the subject, where I can in a matter of minutes gauge their true value.

Well, I’ve just added another tool to my SEO gauge arsenal brought to you from SEOmoz. What is it might you ask? Their SEOquiz. With 75 questions covering a variety of Search Engine Optimzation subjects, varying from beginner knowledge to questions only the “Dark Lords of SEO” possess the answers to.

How did I fare might you ask?
SEO Master - 83%

Gauging from the reaction on their blog post about the quiz, I fared better than most (and the SEOmoz crowd is mostly filled with SEO professionals). But what this really means for me is that I’m going to have to start toting around a laptop with an aircard everywhere I go. Just so the next time I run into one of these guys that proclaim themselves an SEO expert, I can whip out this quiz on the fly and make them prove it to me. The quiz is pretty tough, so I’ve got respect for anyone doing nominally well. My only request from SEOmoz is twofold:

1) Mobile version: Save me the need to have my laptop everywhere
2) Have an SEO certification process, something a little more official that qualifies SEOs as actually knowledgeable or full of shit

And while you may not be as critical as I am about “SEOs” proving their worth - this tool can still benefit you. How? Well, if you’re looking to engage with an SEO firm for some SEO work, have them complete this quiz - ON THE SPOT. The key here is that there is no timer, so it’d be pretty easy to get any score you want just by popping open another browser window and searching for the answer as you’re taking it. So make sure they’re doing it live. Along the same lines, if you’re to a point of hiring an employee or a contractor for some internal SEO work, same thing, have them complete the quiz on the spot.

For our second installment of our SEO Myth Series, we’re going to address page extensions - as in what your filenames end in for your website. With the variety of programming technologies available for web development, a number of different file extensions exist on the web. The most basic being .html or .htm, typically from static html written pages. As website technology advanced, so did the use of other programming languages to create dynamically driven websites - ASP (.asp), PHP (.php), Cold Fusions (.cfm), Java (.jsp), .NET (.aspx), are all examples of commonly used technologies and their corresponding extensions.

Many people hold the belief that the naming of your pages will affect your search rankings. And not to pick on the same person two weeks in a row, but again, the OnTheAvenues.com blog in their Forgotten Fundamentals of SEO post states:

“As a general rule, search engines will not properly index documents that:

• contain a “?” or “&”
• End in the following document types: .cfm, .asp, .shtml, .php, .stm, .jsp, .cgi, .pl
• Could potentially generate a large number of URLs.

To avoid complications, consider creating static pages whenever possible, perhaps using the database to update the pages, not to generate them on the fly.”

And Bonnie isn’t the only person perpetuating this myth. Just recently, I had a conversation with Noah at Resposio, who is a self-proclaimed SEO expert. We have a website hosted with them, and in the setup of this website we were requesting to setup IIS to handle extensionless URLs (like so: http://www.mysite.com/category/product). During this conversation, Noah disputed that these URLs would not be properly indexed by the search engines, and furthermore, the search engines preferred certain extensions over others. In particular, .aspx and .php because it “indicates to them pages that are dynamic and thus update more often”. And he wasn’t just casually mentioning it might be a factor, he was arguing it in a “matter of fact” type attitude. Exactly the opposite of what Bonnie contends.

So, who’s right? Well, neither. While at some point, a long time ago, search engines may have had trouble with dynamic URLs with querystrings, but this logic does not apply today. Just think about this concept, search engines can’t afford to give preference to one or the other - their preference is based on what website is going to provide the best results to the searcher, regardless of how the website is written (even though Microsoft does have a vested interest in the success of .NET).

Because I’m actively involved in the SEO community, I tend to hear a lot of misconceptions about the practice of SEO. Not only from people I know personally, but just from the vast information on the Internet from people branding themselves as Search Engine Optimizers that really don’t qualify, there’s even more incorrect information out there. What makes it worse, is that people continually spread false information about the practice all the time. What makes me so special as to know better than these people perpetuating these myths? I’m not going to pretend I know everything about SEO, but my knowledge is extensive and based on numerous industry recognized sources and years of experience and proven success - my favorite place for SEO newbies? SEOmoz’ Top Ranking Factors

So I’m dedicating an article series featuring myths I see and hear constantly - or at least often enough for me to remember. Granted, SEO is not an exact science, there’s no real definitive fact behind what works and what doesn’t, there are guidelines, best practices, and knowledge gained from experience that can tell us generally what has an impact on search engine placement and what doesn’t. So to kick things off, I give you this week’s SEO Myth - straight from LinkedIn’s Q&A.

The question is simply: “Does Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Really work? If so, what are the best tools?”

Many of the replies were helpful and accurate to a point. But one response caught my attention from Bonnie Burns at OnTheAvenues.com:

“As an SEO expert, I know of all the tools available… For example, it is known that having a Google xml site map is needed, as is having a sitemap for your site. as is a robots.txt. If you did not know that, there is no diagnostic tool that would tell you so…. ”

While having a Google XML sitemap is valuable for sites that aren’t being properly indexed, for new sites, or to ensure all of your pages get indexed, it is by no means necessary for SEO as long as your site is spidered correctly. The same holds true for a sitemap (as in an HTML sitemap I assume), and a robots.txt. Sitemaps and Robots.txt can be very valuable in SEO efforts, don’t get me wrong. However, they are only required in specific scenarios to ensure the correct indexing of your site if it is not already. You won’t be penalized if you don’t have them, and Google (nor the others) will not rank your site higher if you add them (although people have found creative ways to using an HTML sitemap’s structure to assist in their internal linking hierarchy). Everyone’s entitled to one mistake so I gave her the benefit of the doubt. But taking a look at her at her website and blog, I saw other inaccuracies abound. But today’s not a two for one special, so you’ll have to wait until next week for more.