All, I have been playing around to get more traffic from google search & other search engines. I have around 6000 products to sell in my website. I have 3 top categories and three sub level of categories for each top level category under which products can be found. My home page has page rank of 3. None of my other category/product pages have any page rank. Since the product pages do not have any page rank, they never get listed in search results. Now my goal is to get some page ranks to these product pages, so that they appear at top in search results. Now none of my product pages appear in google search results. Currently in my home page, I am displaying random 20 products. Since random 20 products are displayed, will my home page page rank 3 be properly distributed to product pages? Since I thought random pages would create problem. I made my sitemap which has 6000 links as the home page. I know google guidelines state that maximum of 100 links per page. But atleast this way, all the product pages are at second level from home page. Even though google has crawled all my pages by this change, still no improvement in page rank or search results. Now I am planning to change the strategy. Every time google visits my page, show100 links, at the 60th google crawl, all the pages will be crawled. This way home page page rank will shared by few pages, so product pages may get better page rank. Still sounds stupid. The other idea, is split the 6000 products into 60 pages with 100 product page links and add the 60 links to home page. Looks like a better idea. Then I am thinking isn't that what my categories are supposed to do? All SEO gurus out there, any suggestions to get better page rank for product pages when you are selling 6000 products? Thanks in advance
PageRank will not drop simply it will funel it across all other products. If you had like PR5 homepage, it's possible it will funell it to pages and will make 6000 pages of PR1 - PR2, maybe homepage go down for PR1 or PR2, not too certain; anyway, PageRank doesn't matter that much, think more of the usability for visitor, how fast and logic he can access your products;
Thanks for replying. I agree page rank doesn't matter. Currently my pages are designed with usability in mind, products are properly classified in multi level categories. Unfortunately in this current world, we still need to depend on google. Unless we feed the spider correctly, no body is going to visit the website.
Keep your site designed for your visitors. If you want all your pages indexed they do not all need to have extrenal backlinks, what you need are 'some' strong links pointing inside your site or 'many' weak links pointing inside your site. Obviously as long as your website is crawlable then a few high pr/relative links that point to products will be enough for G to do deeper crawls as they grow to trust you. Perhaps you should look at paying bloggers/sites to do product reviews linking directly to your products or giving free products for reviews, look to buy/swap some links in return for relative links pointing inside your site.
I would try to get 8-10 top categories with 8-10 sub categories. This way you get ca. 60-100 pages from which to reach your 6.000 product pages through 60-100 links on each of the sub categories. If it doesn't feel natural to break your "inventory" up into categories like this, you should try to play around a little more and see what numbers you can come up with. Just my 2 cents
Unless you're selling links on your main page, just worry about getting customers & converting the business. Page Rank means SQUAT.
Well I hate the attitude of people who say "Pagerank is useless" without actually telling the person what to do. Pagerank for one is not useless, it can actually help you earn some money if you sell links on your page. On topic: So, I think your second option is better, divide the links into Pages, to save an hard hammers from Google, it would be good if you can do it, that way pages will also be indexed and there will be no PR loss. IT
I would list your sitemap as an individual page which is accessible from a link on your homepage. That would put all links on your site within two clicks from the homepage. Having the sitemap is useful for helping the search engines find all of your content. The main thing that you should be looking at however, is having your main page as the jumping off point for your users. A homepage with 6,000 links does not seem like a page that I would review to find the content I want to read. I would want the main page to give me an overview of the site and a jumping point off into the various categories of the website. Having the sitemap available is useful only when I cannot find what I want through the regular navigation system. Bill Platt