Two Quick Bits on Retail SEO/SEM

Aaron Wall wrote a great post this week that I kept out of the Friday night link roundup because I wanted to comment on a bit. The post has the daunting title, Wasting Link Authority on Ineffective Internal Link Structure, but it boils down to this: Don’t let your user-friendly pages hurt your SEO efforts.

As you could’ve guessed from my involvement in that retail search marketing whitepaper from earlier this week, I’ve been looking at a lot of retail sites of late. And what Aaron is writing about really hit the proverbial nail on the head, specifically his 3rd paragraph:

Some types of filtering are good for humans while being wasteful for search engines. For example, some people may like to sort through products by price levels or look at different sizes and colors, but pages that are almost duplicate with the exception of price point, size, model number, or item color may create near duplicate content that search engines do not want to index.

Exactly. That’s very common on retail sites, especially the major retailers that need to have the same 50 products sortable in 50 different ways, with each way/page chewing up internal link equity. Another similar issue with retail sites is the need to have hundreds of internal links, to category and sub-category pages, for example, across the site. It’s terrible SEO.

And then, on the PPC side, Brad Geddes points out that Google AdWords now has a retail-specific help center. I would assume that could be pretty useful for your PPC campaigns.

[tags]seo, retail seo, retail search marketing, aaron wall, brad geddes[/tags]