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Yannick Simon

Millions of SEO Landing Pages,

As the former VP of RueDuCommerce, a french e-commerce web site, in charge of Technology, Web Marketing and specifically SEO between 1999 and 2012, I managed to compete well with Amazon into the Google.fr’s SERP.

near by Jan’12, i managed to compete with Amazon. However, i left the company at this time.

To achieve this goal, i had to index millions of web pages into Google.fr ! Each page for a specific query. Millions of queries (source Adwords) mean millions of web pages.

The Idea

At first, most of these visitors were looking for simple queries like “ipod”, “wii”, “laptop computer”. It was easy, in 2006, to rank well in Google, because there were not a lot of competitors at this time. Each category of our catalog had a specific URL, optimised for these “keywords”.

In 2016, there will be more than 200 000 french e-commerce websites selling the same products as Amazon, Cdiscount.com, RueDuCommerce.fr … with the same datas, prices, description, content for each product … the same categories…

My idea was simple, if a user is looking for a specific kind of products (as long as we have several products for this query), i should provide a specific landing page !

Since then, many competitors chose the same technology

Example : cdiscount.com

Usually, when a customer is looking for a “apple iphone 5c rose 16go” (which is a ‘iphone 5c pink with 16GB’ in english), he may be supposed to type this query into the search engine of cdiscount.com (the #1 french e-commerce web site).

You can notice there are different colors for this product. It is important to display each iphone with differents offers (with a headset, other colors, special offers, some bundles with accessories …)

Another way to find the same product with google.fr

note : you can see there is a specific page indexed for cdiscount.com

click on it, you’ll reach
http://www.cdiscount.com/telephonie/r-iphone+5c+rose+16+go.html

This is a specific landing page for the query “iphone 5c rose 16 go”
there is 141 returned products, and a specific text (which is a specific template … with ugly empty holes filled with the query itself)

This SEO landing page is the “same” page (or nearly the same) you may found with a search into the cdiscount’s search engine !

With a semrush export, we can notice that, on the 30000 best pages of cdiscount.com for google.fr, 46% of the ranking pages are provided with this kind of technology (13841/30000) for url that contains “/r-”

It’s almost half of the website !

Create thousands or millions of landing pages

You can have a very large catalog, you won’t be able to build alone as many landing pages as needed.

RueDuCommerce had more than 10000 categories of products, made by hand, with specific marketing on it…. we needed in fact, more than 1 million landing pages
this is a common tree of a e-commerce web sites

for each category, you should index thousands or millions of additional web pages

trad : your category => you should add many other categories

There are 4 solutions for this :

  • add by hand, as many categories as you need, add the internal links , maintain them, be careful
  • let googlebots crawl and index your own facets : be careful with the billions of pages to crawl (in addition, magento, prestashop, and other add a “link rel canonical” to the category without any facet : it’s a bad idea)
  • Crawl your own web site, with every facets : for each page, note the <H1> tag, add links from your common web pages to the pages you want to index. Don’t link, block or rel=nofollow the facets you don’t want to index.
  • finally, you can index your own SERP into the Google SERP : for this solution, you may want to index SPECIFIC facets and/or keywords, very carefully, of your Search Engine (solr, elasticsearch, antidot, etc…) . And you’ll need a very powerfull solution to add millions of internal links from your common pages to these specific SEO landing pages.
“just before the common footer : ‘suggestion de liens’ : is the set of internal links to the /index/* pages (and other ones)”

The questions you should ask ,

  • Amazon uses this technology too. In 2012, Amazon indexed more than 200 millions of this kind of pages only for amazon.fr into google.fr
  • Google says you should not index results of your search engine : ok ? My ElasticSearch engine is a powerfull tool with facets and keywords, what is the difference ?
  • How do you find these keywords ? your Google Search Console, your Adwords account, semrush, myposeo, your own statistics, your http logs ?
  • How do you manage the duplicate content ? yes ! this is a correct question … my answer is : you should make a md5 of the results of your listing products for each web pages and compare with each other :)
  • How do you add these millions of internal links ? this depends on the technology you have … but usually, you should take a look at “cocon semantique” into google from Laurent Bourrelly , or the OneHydra solution (in GB)
  • The products displayed on the internal SERP pages are not the correct ones … When it occurs, the reason is usually your own search engines is not correctly configured of feeded by your informations :)

As far as i am concerned,

I tried this kind of SEO with different kind of web sites :

  • it didn’t really work with small business : 3000 products are not enough
  • it didn’t work at all with books : amazon is the leader, impossible to reach it
  • it’s working with a large catalog : 300 000 products : efficient. I can generate 300 000 seo landing pages, more than 20% of additional trafic.
  • it’s wonderfull with a large market-place : 1000 000 products and more : Yahooooo !! (humm… sorry Marissa)

Which one are you ? ;-)

Contact : Yannick Simon