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Webpage Indexing


DizzyDan

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I have a family member that runs a wholesale electrical part company where they have a database with hundreds of thousands of parts.

 

They asked me if I could create a website so people can search for their parts via web search.

 

They also mentioned they spoke to someone years ago that indexing this was an issue which is why they haven't moved forward yet, saying that you can only submit so many pages to google.

 

I was under the impression that google automatically indexes your site but I have never worked on something of that scale before.

 

Is this true? Is there a way to confirm all the parts will get indexed? Is there a pay per 1000 to ensure indexing?

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Google should index all the pages on your site as long as there are links to them (which possibly is not happening currently). Hundreds of thousands is quite a lot, though.

 

If you actually have such a large amount of items in the database I would recommend structuring your data and building your own search feature. Databases are intended to be searched.

 

Having your website built in a tree structure would be easier. Each branch of the tree would be slightly more specific than the last, this is data architecture. Trees are much faster to navigate than lists.

 

Take Canada Computers, for example: www.canadacomputers.com/

Under "Shop Products" they have a set of options, under each of those options they have subcategories. Clicking on a subcategory will take you to a page where products are shown and on the left of the page the category is further divided into more options.

 

An example of one of the paths you can take down the tree is

"Laptops, Dektops and Tablets" > "Laptops & Ultrabooks" > "Notebooks"

 

After that, they give you dropdown to filter by "All" or "Best Selling"

 

When you have such a large amount of data, data architecture is important.

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Thank you for your reply! They do already have a search feature they just want to update it with the new 1 million parts.

 

Interestingly though, he brought up that his previous developer said he would need to build a script (for approx $1,500) that would handle indexing the new 1 million parts with google.

 

I just don't understand what this script will actually do in order to index his database with google, any thoughts?

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The idea is that most people looking of these parts will know the part number and just copy and paste that part number into a google search. Its low competition and his would most likely show up on the first page if not be the only result.

 

Do you think a sitemap with a link to every part number would be necessary or worth the investment?

Edited by DizzyDan
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So this would have to broken down into approx. 20 separate site map files? However my real question is how important would it be to build these sitemaps? If the Database alone not enough?

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Google can't read your database directly, there needs to be a web page with any information you want Google to know about. You can write a series of scripts to list all of the products in the database by category or however you want to do that.

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So the script would be for creating the XML Sitemap for the 1 million records?

 

Do you know of a good resource for a tutorial or examples of some XML sitemaps for a database?

Edited by DizzyDan
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It doesn't need to be XML, you could also just make a human-usable index of categories and products. A sitemap is specifically for search engines, but you could also just make a script to list each category and the products inside, where you can click on the various categories to list the products in each one. Each product would also need to be a link to that product page.

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