Will your Amrod products show up on Google?

Your category pages and anything you write yourself can rank well. Individual product pages carrying the supplier's own description rarely win on the product name alone, because every reseller publishes that same text. Neither fact is a reason to skip putting the catalogue online, but they decide where the effort goes.

Categories rank, product pages mostly do not

Yes, but not the way most people picture it. Your category pages and any page you write yourself can rank well. Individual product pages carrying the supplier's own description rarely rank on the product name alone, because every other reseller has that same description.

That is not a reason to skip putting the catalogue online. It is a reason to be clear about which parts of the site do the work, so you are not disappointed by the wrong thing.

What has to be true before anything ranks

Four things, and the first two are the ones that get missed.

The pages have to be on your own domain. A storefront hosted on your supplier's website earns results for that website. This is the single most common reason a reseller feels invisible despite having their range online somewhere.

A search engine has to be able to read the page without running the site. If the product information only appears after the browser executes code, crawlers see a shell. This is not hypothetical: Amrod's own API documentation is built that way, and a crawler fetching it receives a page title, one description sentence and no content at all.

The pages have to be crawlable and linked. Products reachable only through a search box or a filter may never be found. Categories linked from your navigation, and products linked from categories, are.

The site has to exist for a while. A new domain starts with nothing. There is no way to buy past that.

Which pages realistically rank

Think of a catalogue site as three layers, with very different prospects.

Category pages have the best chance. "Branded golf shirts", "corporate gifts", "promotional drinkware", each with a real page carrying your own words about what you supply and how you work. These compete against other resellers rather than against thousands of identical product pages, and you can write them.

Pages you write have the best chance of all. Anything answering a real question, in your own words, aimed at the kind of customer you want. Nobody else has that page.

Product pages are the weakest, individually. Four thousand pages carrying the supplier's description are four thousand pages that look like everyone else's. Some will rank, particularly for long specific searches, but they are not the engine.

What a big catalogue actually buys you

Resellers are often sold on the number. Four thousand products sounds like four thousand chances to be found.

It is better understood as depth rather than reach. What the catalogue gives you is this.

• Somewhere to send people. When somebody asks whether you can supply something, the answer is a link rather than a PDF.
• A reason to stay. A visitor who arrives from anywhere can browse a real range instead of a brochure page.
• Long specific searches. Someone searching a precise product name and a colour may well land on your page, and those visitors are close to ordering.
• Credibility. A buyer comparing three suppliers takes the one with a working catalogue more seriously than the one with a contact form.

What it does not buy you is a shortcut. Volume alone does not rank.

The pages that do the work

If you want the site to be found rather than just to exist, the effort goes into a small number of pages rather than across four thousand.

Category pages with real content. Not a heading and a grid. A few hundred words about what you actually supply in that category: the fabric weights you recommend, the branding methods that suit it, realistic lead times, minimum quantities. That is knowledge you already have and almost nobody publishes.

Pages for how customers describe their problem. People search by occasion more than by category. Year-end gifts, golf days, staff onboarding, conference giveaways, safety compliance. Each is a page, and each is uncontested compared with the product terms.

Pages about the places you serve. If you deliver nationally but you are in Durban, say so in a page that means something rather than in a footer.

Rewritten descriptions on your best sellers. Not four thousand. The thirty you actually sell.

What a free supplier storefront does for your search results

Very little, and the reason is structural.

A storefront on the supplier's domain is a page on somebody else's website. Any authority it earns accrues there. It also carries no prices and cannot take an order, so even when someone does find it, the journey stops.

It is a reasonable thing to have. It is not a search strategy, and it is not a substitute for a site of your own.

What about the assistants people ask instead of searching?

A growing share of buying questions now go to an AI assistant rather than a search box. The mechanics differ from ordinary search in two ways.

An assistant answering a question draws on pages it can read. That is a lower bar than ranking, and a higher one, at the same time. Lower because you do not have to be first for anything. Higher because the page has to be readable as plain text and structured clearly enough to be quoted.

Three things make a page usable this way, and they overlap almost entirely with what makes a page useful to a person.

• The answer stated plainly, near the top. Not built up to over several paragraphs.
• Real specifics. Figures, names, conditions. Vague pages are not quotable.
• Content in the page itself. If the text only appears after a browser runs code, a machine reading the page sees nothing.

There is a live example of that last point. Amrod's own API documentation is built as a JavaScript application, and a crawler fetching it receives a title, one description sentence and no content whatsoever. Everything useful is assembled in the browser. So on questions about how that catalogue works, there is very little for a machine to draw on.

For a reseller the practical implication is small but real: plainly written pages about what you supply and how you work are readable by both audiences, and most catalogue sites publish nothing of the kind.

What you should expect

A new catalogue website will not appear in search results in its first weeks. The early months are crawling and indexing. Category pages start to show before product pages. Anything you write yourself outperforms anything the supplier wrote.

The two things that decide whether it works are whether the pages are on your own domain, and whether anybody writes anything. The first is settled by how the site is built. The second is up to you, and it is where almost every reseller site stops.

Questions we get asked about this

Do all 4 000 products get indexed?

Some will, many will not, and that is normal. Search engines crawl a large site gradually and index what they judge worth keeping. A catalogue site earns its indexing over months, not at launch.

Can I rank for a product name every reseller sells?

For the product name alone, rarely, because you are one of many pages carrying the same supplier description. For the product plus a place, a use or a quantity, often, because far fewer pages address that.

Does having more products help me rank?

Not by itself. Volume without distinct content mostly adds pages that compete with each other. What helps is a smaller number of pages that answer something specific.

How long before this starts working?

Longer than anyone selling you a website will want to say. A new domain has no history, and the first few months are mostly crawling and indexing rather than ranking.

Last updated 9 September 2026. Sources and limits.