Your ecommerce website will need to address several SEO challenges such as funneling of internal link values and duplicate content, among others. Your basic aim should be to provide Google and other search engines precise data that it needs to provide the right landing page for your visitors.
You can follow these crucial segmentation and filtering tips for your Ecommerce website to connect better with major search engines such as Google and deliver a better user experience to your visitors.
Since each particular product webpage will have far less duplicate content as compared to your product category page, your product webpage will receive better rankings. However, a visitor might not wish to see a particular product when typing in a search query, but instead may wish to see all products that fall in that category.
You can solve this issue by inserting adequate text for each product category. Your products page can include an extension of category description provided you ensure the presence of unique content for each page. However, this move will involve a lot of effort.
Another option that could confuse you is whether you require Google to differentiate between different categories that have to end up on different pages, use different filters and sorting methods, or just be disregarded by Google. Google Webmaster Tools provides different options such as inserting filters to indicate to Google about parameters that can be ignored. You can indicate that each Brand on your Ecommerce site turns into its own unique page while ignoring other parameters such as shape, color, size, etc., based on your specific needs.
You can also instruct Google bots on how to treat duplicate content by delivering precise instructions through the “hreflang”, “rel=next”, and “canonical tag” features. However, you should not be surprised if some of these instructions are not picked up by Google robots and your link value could suffer.
In case you want to retain link value due to pages that you wish are not indexed by Google then you can use JavaScript to indicate so. Your URL can be used to deliver precise messages to Google bots. You can provide separate URL names to each category page with its very own content. In addition, you can create sub-segments such as brand name by indicating so in the form of a GET-variable, i.e. after the question mark symbol.
You can use hash-tags to create filters that hide or show products, among other action. Any content after the hash-tag will not be read by Google and this will enable visitors to share and bookmark the complete URL while ensuring that unwanted pages do not rank. You can now set the number and type of products along with their snippets that get loaded in HTML while the rest of the JavaScript does not adversely affect your keyword strength or cause issues with duplicate content.
However, you need to ensure that you utilize JavaScript only in a logical manner since Google will quickly determine your efforts as spam if you become too aggressive. These segmentation and filtering tips should surely help you to communicate with search engine bots in a more precise manner while optimizing your Ecommerce website.