Quirks of Google - plea for help

[Bud]

I've been really struggling to get my head round what to do about this: :confused:

Looking at my natural visitors I see that despite being Googled to death (good), all visitors are taken either directly to a product.php or category.php.

Product.php is great as they are taken straight to an item. OK, they don't see a full list of merchants supplying this item, but at least they've found what they're after.

Category.php is a little different:

From what I can tell, all of my visitors are directed to either the 1st page in a category (eg. http://theoffsetshop.co.uk/category.php?c=229) or the 1st page in a merchant's category listing (eg. http://theoffsetshop.co.uk/category.php?c=229&m=1599).

They are never directed to a sub page of any category (eg. http://theoffsetshop.co.uk/category.php?c=229&iListOffset=20)

Why is this a problem?

As I see it, Google has found the item in a category (the whole category) but does not register that this may be at: .... &iListOffset=20 or 100 etc. Therefore all visitors are sent to page 1 of the category - thus item is not on that page - visitor leaves.

I hope that's clear.

My question to any SEO experts - is there any way to 'force' Google to index these pages correctly, thus at least giving the visitors a chance of finding the item on the page they land? Does it not recognise the &iListOffset string?

I can see that changes in stock etc will always give a less than 100% hit rate but at least my visitors would stand a fighting chance of going to a useful page.

I would really appreciate any advice/suggestions. Please feel free to PM me if you'd like to discuss this further (or rather not post), or if this sort of thing is your professional field.

Many Thanks

Bud

[amcho]

One possiblility is that google has only indexed your main page and one level down so your main page is indexed as are pages with links on your main page, but sub pages of categories (eg. http://theoffsetshop.co.uk/category....iListOffset=20)
are not yet indexed

[Bud]

You say "not yet indexed", so do you think that in time these should start to appear?

[Confuscius]

Hi Bud

You already have quite a few offset pages indexed - try this : http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:theoffsetshop.co.uk+20&hl=en&start=10&sa=N

Google will find them fairly quickly but whether they become visible in search results can take longer.

Getting Google to serve up what YOU want it to is an art form given that pages are continually changing - Google indexes a page and by the time it becomes findable via search then its contents will probably have changed because of the way that Shop Window currently operates.

Paul

[Bud]

Paul, amcho

Thanks very much for your responses, I feel a lot happier now!

Also thanks for reminding me that I should have checked using site:. I obviously was having a bit of tunnel vision yesterday!

Cheers

[chartfieldconsultants]

Best advice I can think of is to 'noindex' the category page template (and the search results page too) so that Google only bothers with the front page and with the individual product pages where you're only one click away from getting the cookie on the visitor's machine. Indexing categories seems to me unnecessary, and to potentially dilute your results.

[Andy]

Nice idea chartfieldconsultants.
there's alittle debate as to wether noindex is taken to mean nofollow by google. if so, noindex would result in every link on those pages being ignored as much as the rest of the page content. With SEO being mainly backlink orientated nowadays, you could dilute your pagerank (not Toolbar pagerank) as well as the indexed pages.

Perhaps someone with more understanding of the ways, could test this.

Personally, I would bring my robots.txt into play here. google always sets it's index up according to your robots.txt (thats not to say they haven't been crawling my admin panels, cheeky buggers)

[Bud]

Update to my original post...

You were quite right ... Google is now quite happily sending lots of visitors directly to individual product pages - That's the good bit.

The bad bit - on about 50% of the pages directed to, the product is no longer available or moved.

Oh well ...