SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION FOR E-COMMERCE SITES

Special SEO Challenges of E-commerce Websites

E-commerce websites often present special SEO challenges. These special challenges include indexing of content that is stored in a database and served up "dynamically" as each visitor requests it. The typical case where this is a problem is an online catalog or searchable database of information. The reason this is a sticky issue from an SEO standpoint is because the search engine spiders, until recently, did not index any pages that come from a database. The reason is that they considered dynamic pages to be a "spider trap".

A spider trap is essentially a deadlocked state in which the spider gets "stuck" waiting for the server and vice-versa. This happens because the spider asks the server for a web page at a given url, while at the same time the server is expecting the spider to supply parameters to tell it which page to serve up. Since the spider is not able to understand this, never mind come up with the correct parameters, the spider is "trapped" by the web page. Rather than sit around waiting for the web server to respond (or until a timeout occurs) the spiders simply detect dynamically served pages from the contents of the url string. When they find one, they just move on instead of indexing that page.

Dynamic Content and Search Engine Optimization

To understand how to address this indexing problem with dynamic content, it is necessary to go a little deeper. Spiders can recognize dynamic pages because they usually have a "?" in the url string, followed by a long list of database "parameters". It is these very parameters that make each database page unique. However, deciphering these parameters was beyond the spiders' capabilities until recently (and still is to some extent), so whenever they found a url string with a "?", they just stopped indexing that page and moved on.

Within the past couple of years, Google and others have developed the capability for their spiders to interpret basic parameters as long as there are not too many of them. This has enabled the search engines to begin to index the vast amount of web content contained in web-accessible databases. And while the indexing process is still painfully slow, if you follow a couple of programming techniques, you can get Google to eventually index a database containing millions of records.

If you are not willing to wait, there are a couple other options. One is to replicate your dynamic pages as static ones so the spiders can easily find and index them. This has the obvious drawbacks of being hard to maintain and requiring lots of disk space.

Another alternative is to reformat your url strings in such a way that the spiders don't see them as a dynamic page. This process can be automated somewhat, but still presents other difficulties.

Yet another option is to submit your catalog database directly to the search engines for indexing "offline". This approach has great promise but is still in its early stages.

In deciding which approach will work best for you, consider hiring an SEO expert like StratiMind that is familiar with the special issues presented by dynamic content and e-commerce web sites.

---

Ready to talk to the experts? Call or email us to set up an appointment to discuss your specific needs, and join the growing list of satisfied StratiMind clients.