Would a "hidden" Brand List be helpful for SEO purposes?

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Topic summary

A user is developing an SEO strategy for an e-commerce site selling products from multiple brands. They want to attract traffic from brand-name searches but are concerned about competitors easily accessing their brand list.

Key Question:
Whether to create a brand list page that’s hidden from site navigation but still crawlable by search engines.

Expert Recommendation:

  • Build dedicated collection pages for each brand (potentially segmented by product category, e.g., “Brand Name Shoes” vs “Brand Name T-Shirts”) to effectively rank for brand terms
  • Expected ranking: positions 2-3 at best, as ranking for other brands’ terms is challenging
  • Don’t invest effort in hiding brand information from competitors—motivated competitors will crawl and scrape the site regardless
  • “Security through obscurity” approach is not recommended

Status: The original poster found the advice helpful and requested examples of how to structure these brand pages.

Summarized with AI on October 29. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

I am currently working on refreshing and building out our SEO. We sell items from multiple brands and want to gain traffic from customers searching for those brands by name.

We want to know if it would be helpful to include a brand list page on our website, however we don’t want competitors to have easy access to this list. Would it be beneficial to create a brand list page but not have it discoverable anywhere on our site?

Are there any recommendations or general SEO rule of thumbs to attract customers searching for specific brands?

Thanks!

3 Likes
2

Thank you so much for your informative and in-depth reply, it’s extremely helpful!

If you don’t mind sharing, I would love a peak at how you structured yours.

3

If you want to rank for other brand’s terms (which is hard, you’ll probably rank in positions 2-3 best case scenario, but can work), you’ll want to build at least one collection per brand. You might even need to build one per brand + product category depending on how many products you’re carrying (e.g. “Vans” vs “Vans Shoes” vs “Vans T-Shirts” etc).

In terms of not wanting competitors to have access to this list… I would not worry about it. Any sufficiently motivated competitor will crawl your site and scrape all the info out. There’s no way to stop that, so I would not spend your time with a “security through obscurity” approach.