Has anyone taken the time to figure out optimal number of products to list in relation to search engine optimization?


One of the obstacles we seem to run into is spiders not liking the duplicate content/meta information on category pages. The engines will often index the main page and the items within properly but then do very little with subsequent pages and their data. The information ends up getting flagged in webmaster tools and presumably the pages are dumped.



As an example, page one of the messenger bags category is hit about 4x slower/never. This follows through, the first page of coolers is hit frequently, the last page of coolers maybe once a month. Some of the larger categories are even worse with the bots never digging way in deep or if they do like with the totes page its never actually cached.



We've contemplated breaking items down into further categories but at some point we'd end up with so many compartments/categories that customers would be left clicking all over the site to view all the items. How do others handle the situation?

We've considered going to smaller images so that we could fit more on a single page but aren't sure that's the way to go either as even smaller images increase the load time.