Car Inventory: To Index or Not to Index
As with many of my posts lately, I’m going to ride the fence. There are advantages and disadvantages to having your website inventory indexed. This issue has popped up more and more lately as a lot of gurus are pointing towards indexed inventory as a strong SEO tool.
To me, it’s a gray issue.
Advantages of Indexed Inventory:
- More pages
- More opportunities to rank for long-tail keywords
- Searchers land on specific vehicles versus navigation
- Internal link potential (if done properly) to help other pages rank well
Disadvantages:
- Temporary listings that can become 404 errors or redirects when the search engines crawl the page next time
- Duplicate content
- Lack of focus on primary linked pages
For those who want the verdict without the details, I can say that IF the website provider is doing everything else that is required to properly optimize the homepage and landing pages, the benefits can outweigh the disadvantages. That’s a big IF, as most website providers rely on indexed inventory as the primary tool in their SEO strategy. For high-volume keywords, it just doesn’t help. Here is a list of the top 10 for the difficult, high-volume keyword "Los Angeles Honda":
- http://www.1sthonda.com - 16 Indexed Pages
- http://www.hondaofhollywood.com/ - 580 Indexed Pages
- http://w3.normreeveshonda.com – 11 Indexed Pages
- http://www.lacyclesports.com/ - 1 Indexed Page
- http://www.buenaparkhonda.net/ - 797 Indexed Pages
- http://www.robertsonhonda.com/ - 41 Indexed Pages
- http://www.lahondaworld.com/ - 1700 Indexed Pages
- http://www.scottrobinsonhonda.com – 33 Indexed Pages
- http://www.amhonda.com – 429 Indexed Pages
- http://www.hondaofsantamonica.com – 620 Indexed Pages
OK, now, most gurus will say, "Yes, but what about the other keywords? Even though they aren’t number 1 for that keyword, they probably rank for a lot more keywords!"
Well, no. Not in this case.
- http://www.lahondaworld.com/ - 1700 Indexed Pages – Ranked for 20 Keywords
- http://www.buenaparkhonda.net/ - 797 Indexed Pages – Ranked for 79 Keywords
- http://www.hondaofsantamonica.com – 620 Indexed Pages – Ranked for 59 Keywords
- Los Angeles Honda Dealers - 16 Indexed Pages - Ranked for 216 keywords.
Please understand that I am NOT using this example to say "indexed inventory is bad for SEO." All I am wanting to point out is that most companies use their indexed inventory as the bulk of their SEO technique (and sales pitch). I had a discussion with a dealer today who was considering going with a vendor who had a pitch for their indexed inventory that apparently blew my pitch for sound SEO strategy out of the water. I talked about links. I talked about proper formatting of the website.
The other vendor really hammered him on indexed pages. Luckily, I got one last chance to prove my point. We compared our website, one that the dealer chose from a list of 50, and compared it to the other vendor’s sample multi-brand website that should have ranked for 300 keywords. They ranked for 16. My single brand dealer ranked for 173. Case closed.
Indexing inventory IF DONE RIGHT AND AS PART OF A COMPLETE OPTIMIZATION CAMPAIGN is not a bad thing. That is all up for debate. What is NOT up for debate is whether or not indexing inventory is the key to SEO. It isn’t.
Leather interior doesn’t make a car drive any faster.
* * *
Read more Automotive SEO Tips on this blog.
November 8th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
For broad keywords like “Los Angeles Honda” the total number of pages on a website or the number of inventory pages have no correlation on rankings, which your data confirms. The search phrase you used, “Los Angeles Honda”, could be best easily optimized solely on the home page content or contact us page which has supporting text about the Los Angeles market for an LA based car dealer. So, a site that has very few pages could very easily rank well on Google Page one as long as the keyword applied to their business. But this really has nothing to do with car inventory indexing.
The reason you want to have your inventory indexed, if they pages are created properly, is for model specific searches. My research has shown that over 70% of car dealer inventory modules are not built for Google page one rankings and most violate Google’s Webmaster guidelines. The fact that your data shows large sites not ranking well confirms by research.
An inventory page that is hosted onsite and that has an optimized URL and META tags will show up for top targeted search phrases. The three large page sites in your article:
• http://www.lahondaworld.com
• http://www.buenaparkhonda.net
• http://www.hondaofsantamonica.com
all fail one or all of Google Webmaster Guidelines for having unique META descriptions, simple optimized URL names or effective page titles. So there is no wonder why these large sites are not ranked well for more keywords. Showing obviously flawed inventory platforms for the lack of SEO rankings is not effective in build a case.
Google reports on average 9,900 consumer a month type in “Los Angeles Honda” . Google also reports on average 50,000 people a month type in “2007 Honda Civic” and 33,000 people a month type in “2005 Honda Civic”. If a car dealer inventory pages are not indexed and not tagged properly, they will not have the ability to attract these search phrases that have 400% more volume and represent highly targeted buyers. Third party lead collectors have figured out how to capture these high volume model specific searches.
The real “gold” out there for car dealers in this economy is to have optimized inventory pages to capture used car search. If you look at cars.com, autos.yahoo.com and motortrend.com, all of these sites have highly optimized database systems that generate unique URL names, for every car make, model and year. They do this to capture used car search and to sell leads. It’s amazing that the majority of car dealer platforms haven’t implemented a simple design.
In my opinion, there is no downside in having your inventory indexed if the pages are truly compliant with Google Webmaster guidelines. The problem is that there are so few examples to actually measure the benefit.
Here is some example of how an optimized HTML car marketing page can achieve top rankings. If you type any of these phrases into Google:
• 2008 bmw x5 boston
• 2008 bmw 328i boston
• bmw 328i boston
• 2009 acura tl boston
You will see that the page architecture and URL is optimized and so Google rewards the page with page one placement. Now if an inventory module was able to produce optimized pages for every car like this automotically, it would be a winning design.
Your point that SEO is not all about indexed inventory is correct. Links, content and other factors play a role in page one rankings.
But a dealer that does all of those things and then adds an inventory module that is hosted onsite and that is Google Webmaster Guideline compliant, that dealer will stand out well above the competition.
November 24th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
I couldn’t agree more with you Brian. I hear the above argument all the time, especially from companies and providers using non-web-compliant inventory modules, ones that are hosted on another url, or is flash based, or some other, non-valid form of vehicle display. My companies system has seen up to 1500 pages indexed for a single dealer with about 250 cars. Brian is absolutely correct that these indexed pages are perfect for model keyword, but also great for city keywords, equipment or other “special” features a particular vehicle might have. Just in Google analytics if you have your pages SEO for models or other keywords, you can track this.
I do agree that proper SEM should naturally be done, but to say that inventory pages not being indexed isn’t relevant, is not correct. I see the relevancy on a regular basis. In fact, we were planning on using our API to develop some external search sites from the inventory we have through all our dealer clients and actually came across something that proves the point. http://www.autowebengine.com/2008/11/awe-seo-effect/. Keep in mind, no special SEM was done, and no content pages were created, just straight up inventory that was indexed by Google. Indexed pages works, provided, like Brian says, you use them properly.