are limited results per page a bad idea? 1

[slickwillyslim]

i started with one simple product page that could pull everything to one page filtered by category. that was before i knew the importance of having a sizeable site. i have since created several categorized product pages. but some of the product categories have a butload of products. what i would like to know is how safe would it be to display, say 15 results per page? i'm concerned that the spiders may not ever see the other results pages. i figure that if i leave everything on one page, the spiders will surely get it all, but the page will load slow on a dialup modem and i may lose some customers. any suggestions?

 

[ChrisHirst]

providing the links to the extra pages are crawlable links (not using javascript or form button links) all the pages will be crawled. It's just may take a little longer to get all products listed.


Chris.

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[slickwillyslim]

Thanks Chris. great food for thought. think maybe i'll go with limited results pages....

 

[Jeremy21b]

I would recommend limiting the number of products per page in the regular pages. Not everyone has a high speed connection. You don't want to lose business from dial up users just to satisfy search engines. So design the main pages with the people as the main priority. Just make sure you have a way for search engine spiders to navigate to every product page (the fewer clicks the better). A sitemap might be a good idea. Or you might want to at least have a link to each page in a product category list (ie. Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4)

 

[figmatalan]

What software are you using to do the prods/page?

I did a website for someone (*WARNING - OVER 18's ONLY -

http://www.intimateitems.co.uk)

which uses Actinic Catalogue which isnt very friendly so I re-wrote a lot of the pages in PHP with page links to split categories into pages with 10 products per page, each page was spidered in quite a short time.