Design an online store with hundreds of thousands of products

Recently we have been working with zencart stores that have thousands of products with over a hundred categories and sub categories. We have also seen other zencart stores with more than 100000 products, pretty amazing right? The dilemma is how to present these products and categories in a user friendly way yet still allow search engines to index them well (remember: search engines don’t necessarily index all your links especially if you have too many links and if they are too “deep” in the level. (By levels, I mean something like this: site.com/level1/level2/level3/…. If you are using the default zencart you won’t have this type of link, but if you use some Zencart SEO URL such as Simple Seo Url(SSU) you do have the ability to create links with levels like that. By default SSU uses only 2 level which is really good).

1. You can put products in multiple levels of categories, allowing users to drill down to the exact category that contain the products they want.
   Cons: too many levels will drive the users nuts and you will your your sales. Also, search engines will more than likely ignore many of your product links or update them very slowly.
2. You can put reduce the category levels, but then you will end up having too many top level categories or putting too many products in one category.
   Cons: too confusing and inconvenient for users to easily locate their products (zencart’s search happens to be NOT the best search one can have).

Today I have come across a nice video on seomoz.org by Dr. Pete Meyers of UserEffect and Rand of Seomoz.org with some incredibly valuable tactics for e-commerce site architecture. Below is a brief of the video if you are too lazy or just don’t have a good connection to watch (I still recommend watching it if you can though):

FLAT ARCHITECTURE

We’re hearing more and more about flat architecture these days and its SEO benefits. Essentially, “flattening” a site just means reducing the numbers of steps or layers in the hierarchy. It can be good for SEO and even (sometimes) usability, but what sounds good in theory is very hard to implement on a site with thousands or even hundreds of thousands of pages.

“MIMIC” FLATNESS W/ XML SITEMAP

There’s a lot to be said for choosing a target layer of your site, and XML sitemaps are one way to tell the spiders where to focus (without changing your architecture for users). Experiment with focusing your XML sitemap on the layer (such as the product layer) that you want to target for SEO, especially long-tail, and leave out peripheral pages that have limited SERP value (hey, this reminds me that all Zencart’s current sitemap modules include too many links there. Maybe it’s about time we upgrade those modules and allow users to exclude link from sitemap or give each product link a different weight? Your thoughts please!)

BUILD PRODUCT LINKS AT THE TOP

You can also mimic flatness with direct links to the target layer, such as Top 10 lists or Featured/Popular Products. These effectively flatten the architecture (for spiders and users) for a handful of core products that you select (take a look at the clever use of “popular search” on our client’s dj equipment store. The design was not done by us btw).

BUILD DEEP INBOUND LINKS

Of course, building deep links will also help target your SEO efforts. Manual link building is nearly impossible when you’re talking about thousands of pages, but you can naturally attract links by making sure that your most valuable and viral content complements your target layer. (product review anyone? I always check Amazon’s review before buying a product even if I ended up buying the product somewhere else)

SOCIAL USAGE CUES

Similarly, you can build deep links by attracting return visitors to your target layer. Limit tools such as “Email this page”, social bookmarking, and social media links to critical pages, to naturally draw back visitors. This is good not only for long-tail link building, but also for return-visitor conversion.

If you have any experience in building website with many sub pages please share with us how you went about structuring your site.