Is listing all products on the homepage's footer making a real difference SEO-wise?

Question

I'm working on a website on which I am asked to add to the homepage's footer a list of all the products that are sold on the website along with a link to the products' detail pages.

The problem is that there are about 900 items to display. Not only that doesn't look good but that makes the page render a lot slower.

I've been told that such a technique would improve the website's visibility in Search Engine. I've also heard that such techniques could lead to the opposite effect: google seeing it as "spam".

My question is: Is listing products of a website on its homepage really efficient when it comes to becoming more visible on search engines?

Answer 1

Google is likely to see a huge list of keywords at the bottom of each page as spam. I'd highly recommend not doing this.

Answer 2

When is it ever a good idea to specify 900 items to a user? good practice dictates that large lists are usually paginated to avoid giving the user a huge blob of stuff to look through at once.

That's a good rule of thumb, if you're doing it to help the user, then it's probably good ... if you're doing it purely to help a machine (ie. google/bing), then it might be a bad idea.

Answer 3

You can return different html to genuine users and google by inspecting the user agent of the web request.

That way you can provide the google bot with a lot more text than you'd give a human user.

Update: People have pointed out that you shouldn't do this. I'm leaving this answer up though so that people know it's possible but bad.

Answer 4

That technique is called keyword stuffing and Google says that it's not a good idea:

"Keyword stuffing" refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site's ranking in Google's search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site's ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.

Now you might want to ask: Does their crawler really realize that the list at the bottom of the page is just keyword stuffing? Well, that's a question that only Google could answer (and I'm pretty sure that they don't want to). In any case: Even if you could make a keyword stuffing block that is not recognized, they will probably improve they algorithm and -- sooner or later -- discover the truth. My recommendation: Don't do it.

If you want to optimize your search engine page ranking, do it "the right way" and read the Search Engine Optimization Guide published by Google.