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

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.