Guest Posted April 4, 2005 Posted April 4, 2005 A sitemap is for humans and an all products page is for spiders. A sitemap provides a hierachial view of the website structure and helps navigation. However, for search engine purposes it only points them in the right direction of the categories! Think about this: when you search for a keyphrase how many times does a "contact us" or "shipping info" result come up? Never...because it is usually not relevant to the searcher. It is only relevant to a customer once they land on your site. If you had to choose one area of your store to have listed on search results which area would it be? Articles? Information pages? Categories? PRODUCTS? Let's face it -> the meat and bones of your store are the product pages. This should be the primary focus of all efforts since that is where you close the deal and "window shoppers" become paying customers. The product pages should have good content and distinct document structure. In order to get the customers to the now immaculate product page you will need to provide a healthy buffet of spider food...otherwise known as the all products contribution. As the sitemap is to customers as the all products page is to spiders. It provides a hierachial map of the store's main content (product pages!). Don't make the spiders search 2 or 3 levels deep to find your products! This turns the tables and instead of spidering from the top down they will spider from the bottom up. So, which is better? They both serve different purposes and should not be viewed as competing pages. The sitemap provides a visual navigation aide to customers and the all products page provides a hierachial map of your products to spiders. Here are my favorite contributions that I use on client sites: Sitemap MS2-2.2 All Products Page I would recommend installing both. There are different flavors of each contribution and your mileage may vary :) Enjoy! Bobby
Jeremy at oddly enough Posted April 5, 2005 Posted April 5, 2005 Wouldn't a site map with a logical and heirarchical listing of every page in the site, including all categories and products, serve both functions? I hardcoded a site map for my site, with links to each page. Spiders can see all of the products, and forums, and follow the links to them, and customers can find all of the related info pages they might want to access, in case they were to dense to follow any of the redundant links on the catalog pages! Jeremy
Guest Posted April 5, 2005 Posted April 5, 2005 If you remove the category box (tree) on the left that would be the best contribution for spiders that I've seen...of course with SEO URLs it would be just a little bit better :) Very nice! Bobby
dblake Posted April 10, 2005 Posted April 10, 2005 Yes I basically took the two and combined them too. http://www.biocella-florida.com/sitemap.php Works good, dont have rewrite for these urls but I have pname and cname, and I added in descriptions for each product too, just to theme it some more ;) -Dennis
ChrisW123 Posted May 1, 2005 Posted May 1, 2005 Wouldn't a site map with a logical and heirarchical listing of every page in the site, including all categories and products, serve both functions? I hardcoded a site map for my site, with links to each page. Spiders can see all of the products, and forums, and follow the links to them, and customers can find all of the related info pages they might want to access, in case they were to dense to follow any of the redundant links on the catalog pages! Jeremy <{POST_SNAPBACK}> The "All Products" contribution also lists all of the content (ie. the product descriptions) along with the products which the search engines like.
limetech Posted June 2, 2005 Posted June 2, 2005 I have installed the "all products" contribution but my store has over 7000 products and the page produced is obviously pretty big with thousands of links. I read somewhere that search engines do not spider pages over a certain size or follow more than 100 links per page. Is this correct? If so wouldn't it be better if allprods split the page like product_listing does? Steve
rommany Posted June 3, 2005 Posted June 3, 2005 Ive also added the printable catalog contribution, as i been told for one you customers will like it, and this is a little extra for them little hungry spiders. but even if the spiders do not like it i cant see the harm in having one. Kind regards
kitchenniche Posted June 4, 2005 Posted June 4, 2005 I have installed the "all products" contribution but my store has over 7000 products and the page produced is obviously pretty big with thousands of links. I read somewhere that search engines do not spider pages over a certain size or follow more than 100 links per page. Is this correct? If so wouldn't it be better if allprods split the page like product_listing does? Steve <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I'm interested in an answer to this as well. Any ideas? HIM - Dark Light - Out on 26/09/05
dblake Posted June 4, 2005 Posted June 4, 2005 Yea just split it up. i would put the listing to around 50-75 per page.
RGStephens Posted June 6, 2005 Posted June 6, 2005 I have installed Allprods as well as Header Tags and I am optimistic that you folks out there are smarter than I am about SEO issues. But can someone explain to me how Allprods works? When I look at the code that is created it does not create static pages, so how does a bot know what is out there? :huh: I uderstand the Header Tags contribution but Allprods baffels me :'( Thanks Rick
Jumping Rabbit Posted June 6, 2005 Posted June 6, 2005 I have installed Allprods as well as Header Tags and I am optimistic that you folks out there are smarter than I am about SEO issues. But can someone explain to me how Allprods works? When I look at the code that is created it does not create static pages, so how does a bot know what is out there? :huh: I uderstand the Header Tags contribution but Allprods baffels me :'( Thanks Rick <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Allprods create a page with links to all your products so that the itsy bitsy search engine spiders can find and index absolutely all of your products :D Faster Checkout - osCommerce Knowledge Base - Anyone meet offline?, Has anyone of you cyberkids meet offline? For newbees do atleast read this 4 points: Basic info - Search tips and help - Posting tips and help - Basics for Design
limetech Posted June 6, 2005 Posted June 6, 2005 Can anyone help with some code for splitting the allprods contribution listing to 50 per page? Thanks Steve Yea just split it up. i would put the listing to around 50-75 per page. <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
dblake Posted June 6, 2005 Posted June 6, 2005 Use pages that have products split as an example, such as product_listing.php.
Guest Posted June 22, 2005 Posted June 22, 2005 I have to say that I have both a sitemap for the site, and one for the shop, and then an all products page, and I get a huge amount of traffic from the all_products page alone. Google especially has picked up the items in all_products.php lately, and we get huge amounts of google traffic from that. I'm totally going to be so excited once google picks up the sitemap.xml from Chemo's contribution, so I'm really hoping I'll have to switch servers for bandwidth issues. :ph34r:
pcgigant24 Posted August 13, 2005 Posted August 13, 2005 Yes I basically took the two and combined them too. http://www.biocella-florida.com/sitemap.php Works good, dont have rewrite for these urls but I have pname and cname, and I added in descriptions for each product too, just to theme it some more ;) -Dennis <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Could you post the modified "Sitemap MS2-2.2" module please. I'm very interested in this. Manuel
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