Posted by: Having co-owned and helped to run (what is now commonly called) a digital agency, I recognise fully that there are issues with a large e-commerce site in knowing what is the best method for navigation and avoidance of duplicate pages. Frankly it’s a minefield and of course can affect those all important search rankings due to all the various filters such as high or low price, colours, sizes to name but a few.
There’s a plethora of developers out there of course and it’s challenging to retain one who really understands the issue. Regretfully a lot of developers ignore this and I’ve seen countless rebuilds costing clients more money due to the fact that the focus has been more on design and imagery rather than structure. Often in truth the drive for rebuild can be driven by the client who doesn’t really have the patience for good results to appear or worst still has “read” about web design and now appears to know all (I could name several of the latter)
Structure of course should be the first consideration and Google has issued some really helpful guidelines here. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/02/faceted-navigation-best-and-5-of-worst.html which I think are easy to follow.
There has also been move toward infinite scrolling of course and I have to say that personally, I prefer it. I just hate clicking on next page ad infinitum and always end up clicking “view all”. Having said that it still surprises me how many sites do not have the “view all” option.
To that end, Google has also issued guidelines on how to structure your content management system so that the search engines can crawl items linked from an infinite scroll page.http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly.html.
On another topic I wonder whether Google will ever grasp the nettle of continuous scrolling search and on that subject you may find this article http://www.business-directory-uk.co.uk/blog/2013/01/search-engines-change-continuous-scrolling-answer/ Sad to say though, I very much doubt they will as the structure of their ads would have to change, but I have to say from my own user perspective I would very much prefer it. What are your thoughts?