How will eliminating product cards affect SEO?

In this article, we will consider a situation where all the site’s products are placed on one page, without going to individual cards. How effective or problematic could this be for SEO? One of our subscribers asks: “If I’m creating a website for delivering goods to a region, and I want to do everything on one page, rather than create separate product cards, will this affect indexing? Will search engines understand that we have as many products as our competitors, even though we don’t have separate pages for them?”

How will search engines react?

In fact, it is not a fact that search engines will be able to adequately perceive the assortment of your site and understand that you have no less products than your competitors. This is a similar problem with sites where content is loaded dynamically, without reloading the page.

This looks attractive from a user experience point of view - pages load faster and the site itself is more compact. But if this were the ideal solution, then all sites would have switched to such a scheme long ago, since the technologies have long been available. And although both Google and Yandex have learned to process JavaScript and dynamically loaded pages, there are some difficulties with ranking such sites, namely:

Firstly, such sites are very different from most others. Most websites have a clear directory structure. For websites with products, this structure is quite common. Even in the case of goods delivery, there is something similar, because this is also a catalog of goods for delivery;
Secondly, it is more difficult for search engines to perceive dynamic content, since they are accustomed to the classic site structure, where each page is clearly divided and indexed separately.

Search engines, as a rule, are more confident in processing the classic site structure, where there are separate product pages. They see what products are presented, can highlight the price, take into account commercial factors, and so on. On dynamically loaded pages, all this becomes more complicated, and search engines may show less trust in such pages, since they are not always sure that the product data is correct.

This issue may not be as significant for strong brands. For example, large sites with a well-known brand can use dynamic pages or place all products on one page, and this will not greatly affect their rankings, since their strong brand and high traffic already create good conditions for ranking. Such sites can successfully occupy top positions for queries, even if they do not follow the ideal page structure.

Is it worth making a single page for all products?

Don't mindlessly follow the example of big brands. While their approach works for them, it is not always suitable for start-up sites. It is better to stick to the classic layout, where each product is on a separate page.

You can try a combined approach. For example, when dynamic content was just starting to be implemented, one of the clients used classic product categories, but for products they tried to create a pop-up window on the category page itself so that the user would not go to a separate product card. However, this decision turned out to be controversial: from an SEO point of view, search engines cannot accurately determine whether such a product is useful for the user if he does not go to a separate page. But still, this approach is better than the absence of product cards.

If you want to implement a similar solution, try creating a classic structure with categories, subcategories and products, and dynamically load additional elements for users. This is an interim solution that may work better than just a single product page, but it's not ideal from an SEO perspective.

More detailed information can be found in other articles on our website.

If you have any questions about SEO or website optimization, please contact the SEO COMPUTER studio at info@seo.computer.

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