Shopping cart contents and SEO

[Snowgoat]

We've very little recent experience on shopping carts, and many years ago used Actinic. One advantage in those days was that the products, and their descriptions, were totally visible to search engines, and not buried in a database (well, as far as I remember).

Our 3 current competitors use shopping carts whose products are totally invisible to search engines, though they have good search functions and are slick.

I feel we would have a serious advantage over the competition if all our products are exposed and indexed by Google and the other search engines. This is mainly for out-of-print and rare books - so many items are 'unique'.

Could anyone fill me in as to whether Actinic still has this advantage, or whether there are other products with good SEO or whether I have totally got it wrong?

Perhaps a better question is whether the product database is designed for good SEO, and the cart is just an add-on?

 

[awebapart.com]

We've very little recent experience on shopping carts, and many years ago used Actinic. One advantage in those days was that the products, and their descriptions, were totally visible to search engines, and not buried in a database (well, as far as I remember).

Our 3 current competitors use shopping carts whose products are totally invisible to search engines, though they have good search functions and are slick.

Most decent ecommerce systems are search engine friendly, in that they make it easy for their pages to be crawled by search engines (note: search engine friendly is different to search engine optimised, search engine friendly is just getting the basics right, making pages indexable).

One easy way to tell whether an ecommerce site is search engine friendly, and to see whether product pages are indexed, is to use the site: command followed by the domain name in google's search box. The results should show what pages the search engine has indexed (for newer large sites it could take the search engine a while to index a lot of pages).

Could anyone fill me in as to whether Actinic still has this advantage

Yes it does. Here's an example site command for one of the websites in Actinic's customer examples page.

Sometimes it might depend upon the ecommerce system or how the ecommerce system is configured as to whether the website displays either category pages with several products and detailed pages for each product, or just displays several products on a category page with no detailed product pages.

 

[ecenica]

Confirming awebapart.com's great post. All major ecommerce/shopping applications like Magento and PrestaShop allow you to setup google-friendly URLs. http://example.co.uk/my-product-category/my-product As to getting all products linked in google, key here is to feed Google a sitemap.xml of all your product pages. Answering "Perhaps a better question is whether the product database is designed for good SEO, and the cart is just an add-on"? Yes, the cart is normally just for internal use. In fact it's good practice to hide the page from Google to limit hackers.

 

[Snowgoat]

Thanks, guys, that's invaluable.

I think one of the problems I have to solve (and the index suggestion could be the solution, if I understand it correctly) is that we're not flogging simple widgets, and the main title description of an antiquarian book isn't always going to sit neatly in an url.