Fix This! You'll Instantly Rank Shops On Google!

Intro

Want to know why your current pagination strategy is quietly killing your SEO? After 23 years optimizing thousands of online stores, I can confirm: standard pagination and load more buttons waste over 90% of your ranking potential. So in this video, I’m going to show you exactly how to fix this with a newer, safer, and simpler pagination solution that'll boost indexing, rankings, and sales dramatically. To start, let me show you why it is critical for you to know how to solve this issue in the right way.

The Problem We Couldn’t Solve

One day one of my important clients wanted to increase the amount of products they are selling from roughly 400,000 to 700,000. This is a big increase in products and I advised them to take it slowly and insert them in chunks, so Google could handle them all. But they declined my recommendation and just published all products at once. Two weeks later not even a third of the products were indexed in Google and those which were, didn’t get any top rankings. The management asked me what is happening and I told them that I advised not to do this. But frankly, I didn’t know why exactly Google was refusing even to index the products. Products had a good description, great product photos and filled out schema markups. We even made a special sitemap of sitemaps with 10k URL chunks, sorted the product URLs by importance, but it didn’t help. At the SEO team meeting we discussed for hours what the reason could be and the only logical thing we could think of was that we lacked crawler budget. So all we could do is wait and pray that Google will increase our crawler and indexing budget. We even thought about putting half of them on noindex or hide half of the product URLs from Google and put every day a few on index and somehow get them into the Google index. But we already saw that new product URLs which were indexed never had a top ranking, except those we have put in the prefooter. But we couldn’t put 300k links in the prefooter. We had this huge issue and in addition to that I had to prepare a presentation for a major german SEO conference next week. I made my presentation, but felt awful, because we couldn’t solve this issue. I went to the conference and still felt bad after my presentation, although people congratulated me on it. After I was done with my presentation, I took a look at the conference schedule and saw that Tobias Schwarz will hold a presentation about pagination types. I didn't like the topic, because what is there so much to talk about pagination types anyways. But because I always appreciated his presentations I told myself that I will give it a try. Once the presentation started, I was pinned to my chair. I couldn’t believe how extensive his research has been and what the results were.

The Solution

It was one of those moments where you think - I must be dreaming, because he showed a pagination type which solved our issue. This pagination type shortens the path for the Google bot to product URLs, so the Google bot can discover each product URL in three clicks from any category page. That results in faster indexing for all product URLs. It also gives the product URLs much more link juice, which makes them rank better. He tried it out on a huge website with thousands of pages in certain categories and loved the result. Afterwards he conducted the research by comparing all known pagination types and this table sums his findings up. As you can see the Ghostblock pagination type has advantages in every possible SEO metric and it looks like this when you open page 2 of a category. The biggest benefit of a Ghostblock pagination are given for big online stores, where the biggest category has hundreds of pages, but even if a category has only 11 pages, the online store still benefits. So instead of showing the first and last three pages of a category or the neighbouring pages of the currently opened category page, you should always list the first ten pages. As shown in the example, if you have 30 or more pages and you visit the second page, below the row with the first 10 pages, all pages from 21 to 30 are shown. In that way the Google bot will find all your product URLs in just three clicks and give them at least 13% more link juice in comparison to any pagination type. If compared to basic pagination, the Ghostblock pagination assures up to 400% more link juice for product pages. The calculation differs from shop to shop, but the difference is really impactful. Therefore all product URLs will rank higher in Google with Ghostblock pagination. Ghostblock pagination is an apple tree with ten branches where each branch has not more than three apples. If you decide to use the arrows beside the pagination, they should always be masked, meaning hidden from Google with a PRG mask or just being javascript elements. Why javascript elements? Because the Google bot doesn't see content which is being triggered by the click on a javascript element if they are shown through client server rendering. And here we come to the load more button. The load more button is in most cases a javascript element which loads new products through client server rendering and therefore doesn’t see them, so can’t index them and they don’t get any link juice through category paging. So a load more button is an apple tree without any branches. In rare cases a javascript load more button creates a pagination URL each time the Googlebot or users clicks on them. Those Google bot can index, but that is the worst possible way for the Google bot to discover products URLs, index them and the amount of link juice product URLs get through this kind of load more button is so low, they will never have a top ranking. This kind of load more button is an apple tree with only one branch and may have thousands of apples on that one branch. But there is one good thing about them. Users love them. So you can use them to load more products for the user, without letting them create paging URLs and use the Ghostblock pagination for the Google bot and to distribute more link juice to your product URLs. That’s the ideal combination, because the Ghostblock pagination is not the most user friendly way to navigate through a shop.

The Result

When I came back from the conference, we immediately implemented the Ghostblock pagination, indexed all product URLs in just a few days and got the first top rankings without having to use prefooter links. Ghostblock pagination worked so well for this client and every next client, because it allows faster indexing, improves link juice distribution and therefore results in much better rankings for product pages. But that can't be achieved if you don't delete half of the shop homepage beforehand. If you want to get weekly, proven SEO tactics for explosive organic traffic and sales growth, check our free newsletter in the video description.