A few suggestions for sites that carry classifieds type content
A question that I just responded to on webmasterworld.com, brought back some general questions that I have spent a lot of time theorizing around this year. How do you handle content that is expiring quickly?
First just getting the content indexed in a reasonable amount of time is very difficult, if your ad lasts anywhere less than 5 days this may be impossible. Especially if you delete the ad! I would recommend not deleting the ad and rather spending more time figuring out how to get a user to an ad that is similar and relevant. How you ask? Use a search engine that will be the cleanest way to index and catalog your available options.
Providing users with an alternative method to finding additional content is always helpful. But it’s critical that the options you are providing them are relevant! The simplest method would be to use a search appliance and ask it to provide the top 5 matches for other products or classifieds on the site that could be a good match and to display them. Thus when the search engine gets around to indexing this content it will have the ability to find related products to index and give the user a place to go.
Nothing is more annoying that searching for something and landing on a useless page. Google knows this and does whatever it can not to display such results.
From an indexing point of view a rapidly changing list of pages can be a nightmare as well. For example if you have a category for used tv’s on your classifieds site that has a next prompt at the bottom of it. The search engine assumes that the user will have to click “x” amount of times deep to get to the product at that given time. Make sure you display all pages in a numbered fashion above and below the list to make it easy to find. Then every result is only one click away from the primary category page.
These types of sites are also great candidates from coming up with a Google Sitemaps solution. You can sure that Google will pick up these pages at an expedited rate IF they are refreshed constantly. You cant generate a sitemap once a month and expect this to work.
First just getting the content indexed in a reasonable amount of time is very difficult, if your ad lasts anywhere less than 5 days this may be impossible. Especially if you delete the ad! I would recommend not deleting the ad and rather spending more time figuring out how to get a user to an ad that is similar and relevant. How you ask? Use a search engine that will be the cleanest way to index and catalog your available options.
Providing users with an alternative method to finding additional content is always helpful. But it’s critical that the options you are providing them are relevant! The simplest method would be to use a search appliance and ask it to provide the top 5 matches for other products or classifieds on the site that could be a good match and to display them. Thus when the search engine gets around to indexing this content it will have the ability to find related products to index and give the user a place to go.
Nothing is more annoying that searching for something and landing on a useless page. Google knows this and does whatever it can not to display such results.
From an indexing point of view a rapidly changing list of pages can be a nightmare as well. For example if you have a category for used tv’s on your classifieds site that has a next prompt at the bottom of it. The search engine assumes that the user will have to click “x” amount of times deep to get to the product at that given time. Make sure you display all pages in a numbered fashion above and below the list to make it easy to find. Then every result is only one click away from the primary category page.
These types of sites are also great candidates from coming up with a Google Sitemaps solution. You can sure that Google will pick up these pages at an expedited rate IF they are refreshed constantly. You cant generate a sitemap once a month and expect this to work.
Labels: seo
by Aaron Shear
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home