Launching a product feed site and SEO...

Matthew Wood · 27-05-05

Can anyone help me or give advice on launching a new product feed site with Google? its far too easy to get penalised with todays Google!

Bombarding Google with 10,000 - 50,000 odd pages and getting listed is getting harder to achieve.

Any help greatfully appreciated... if someone can offer a service, we can maybe do a a deal for mutual benefit

Matthew.

Rich · 27-05-05

I'm in the same position, I've got a feeling it might just be an age thing.

BookkooB, which is really a product feed site even though it hardly uses them, has done ok and is now up to almost 400,000 results in Google, though only 136,000 of them seem to be fully indexed which is a bit concerning. Unfortunately I haven't really worked out why it has been crawled so much and other, more standard, product feed sites I've made since have a lot less pages indexed. There must be something about the site as Ask has indexed 1.8 million pages of it.

The most well know general comparison affiliate on here has 1.6 million results in Google and 634,000 indexed!

Things I'm trying on my latest site: -

Heavily cross link the pages within the site - msn seems to prefer to crawl wide rather than deep and more links into each page means more anchor text, which still seems to be a large factor.
Make the pages as unique as possible so as they a different from other product feed sites - I'm considering dropping pages that just feature one product and replace those with links directly to the merchant
Work hard on making the site function as well as possible so as visitors might come back and might link to it - mysql fulltext indexes just don't cut it (in my opinion). I've found links to sites posted by users in forums have sent good traffic in the past.
Looking at starting PPC to the site (still need to learn that skill)

I think it is still a combination of getting links and age. The other thing to try is have links like a top products lists on the home page to guide the bots to the most popular products first - there's little point having a million pages indexed if the 100 most searched for ones aren't.

I guess all that means is I dunno

NetNeo · 27-05-05

all i would suggest is make sure you are using a mod_rewrite not passing variables in th eurl...make it spiderable for the dumbest of search engines and your first (and biggest) hurdle is gone. Although you shouldnt get penalised for passing variables in urls or posts in realitey you will find your rank much lower. You will also have a much slower spidering from google as it throttles back if is is aware that the results are dynamic (Google themselves say this somewhere in the webmaster tips on google.com....they say it is to redue strain of servers!)