Google Freshness Update & Ecommerce Site Strategies
-
Just curious what other ecommerce SEO's are doing to battle fresh content. We've been having our clients work on internal blogs, adding articles one click away from landing pages, and implement product reviews when possible but I don't know that it's enough.
Our bigger customers have landing pages (usually category pages) with very competitive keywords. So my main issue is what to do with fresh content on category pages..
I've toyed with the idea of having the landing page content re written every now and then. We used to use a blog parser to bring snippits of comments from the blog into landing pages but I believe that to be a problem with duplicate content. News snippits from other sites don't seem beneficial either.
Anyone have any other ideas?
-
I approve all these...you should consider freshness as specific to certain kws (generic ones for example)....I already use tips sha has suggested above: check serps manually and decide wether or not a given kw/landing page need fresh content
-
Hi searchpl,
If you are worried about "freshness" for ecommerce sites, there is one very important thing to do - eliminate wasted effort.
The fact is that what I call the "freshness effect" does not apply to every keyword term. Google appears to be determining whether fresh information is, or is not more relevant according to the individual term. If you manually check SERPs you will see this easily.
So, eliminating wasted effort while working toward providing new and relevant content all comes back to good old fashioned research. The smart approach is to spend some time manually checking SERPs for your "money" keywords. If you see evidence of the "freshness effect" for particular terms, those are the ones you could consider focusing new content development efforts on.
The keyword terms that might be affected will entirely depend upon the types of products in your stores - for example, I know that "weight loss" is a term where the "freshness effect" seems evident in SERPs.
Of course, if you decide to develop new content you should follow the advice already given by EGOL and James on quality and method. Incidentally, I would say the smart thing to do in this situation would be to come up with the type of content that is easy to add on a continuous basis - things like ongoing series, videos, podcasts, and cleverly managed user generated content.
Incidentally, if you listen carefully to information coming out of Bing via Duane Forrester, you may notice that Google is not the only Search engine that takes notice of freshness
Hope that helps,
Sha
Also: Don't stress too much if you are using automated feeds to update your product offerings on a daily basis ... you may already be providing fresh content if products are frequently added. The challenge then is to ensure that quality is up to scratch
-
Well things you can do:
-
Blog on sub folder with fresh content each week.
-
you can have category level pages you update, say your top 30 categorys for example then you update these specific pages with fresh content.
I know eCommerce sites are not easy to work with as clients in some cases do not want content on specific pages you just need to keep adding fresh content and product pages where possible.
-
-
I am doing what I described above. I believe that it is far more valuable to build a library of awesome resources for my potential customers than it is.... as you worded it... "having the landing page content re written every now and then."
Writing is a time consuming job. If I am going to do it I am going to be attacking new turf with substantive evergreen content.
Once you have a great landing page don't rewrite it because you think it will impress google. Spend your time improving your site and your visitor's experience.
-
Yes but what about fresh content specifically on a landing/category page.
-
For an ecommerce site I would focus my efforts on evergreen content rather than fresh content.
I would be working to make my product descriptions unique, substantive and exciting.
And, rather than blogging trivia and prattle I would be writing unique, substantive, generously illustrated "how to do it" guides for my important products.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Negative SEO & How long does it take for Google to disavow
Following on from a previous problem of 2 of our main pages completely dropping from index, we have discovered that 150+ spam, porn domains have been directed at our pages (sometime in the last 3-4 months, don't have an exact date). Does anyone have exerpeince on how long it may take Google to take noticed of a new disavow list? Any estimates would be very helpful in determining our next course of action.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vuly1 -
Top-10 ranked site dropping in/out of Google index?
I work for a company that makes an important product in a category. The company has a website (www.company.org); the product is at www.company.org/product. We recently (early May) redesigned and rearchitected the product site for SEO purposes. The company site talks about the category a bit (imagine the Colgate site; it talks about "toothpaste" a bit). The blog (blog.company.org/product) also talks about the category quite a bit (and links to the company site of course). The product is a major product in the category, among the top 3. The site and blog have been around for 15+ years. The site has appx. a billion backlinks, most branded links to the product. It's in the top 50 highest ranked sites among all sites on the internet in the ahrefs rank index. Imagine you are searching for our product category, "category". If you search for "category" in Bing today, my company's site is the 3rd result, and it's the 1st result from a company that makes a product in this category. If you search for "category" in Google today, our site is not in the top 150 results. In fact, the site keeps dropping out of Google's index. (See attached for what that looks like in the search console.) What might cause a site to jump from "ranked in top 10" to "not ranked" in Google -- back and forth every couple of days? Penalties? Our recent (early May) site rearchitecture? We're not making giant, index-shifting changes every day. wE0Bn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hoosteeno0 -
Menus, Ecommerce & SEO
Hi Our Dev team have updated our website with a new menu structure, they have given us 2 options to choose from. 1st option I think is better for SEO - this will be showing top 8 categories and then subcategories once you hover over category 1. Not much change from our current structure, just a slightly different layout. (I have added an image example of what option1 will look like) 2nd option - is preferred by management - shows all 24 categories & no subcategories. My question is, will removing the current subcategories from the main menu make them lose rankings & make them harder to rank in future? I'm guessing everything will move down a level in the structure and lost page authority... Does anyone have any articles/case studies to prove this point? Any help is much appreciated 🙂 Becky DKzgD
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Why isn't Google indexing this site?
Hello, Moz Community My client's site hasn't been indexed by Google, although it was launched a couple of months ago. I've ran down the check points in this article https://mza.bundledseo.com/ugc/8-reasons-why-your-site-might-not-get-indexed without finding a reason why. Any sharp SEO-eyes out there who can spot this quickly? The url is: http://www.oldermann.no/ Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo
INEVO, digital agency0 -
Https & http urls in Google Index
Hi everyone, this question is a two parter: I am now working for a large website - over 500k monthly organic traffic. The site currently has both http and https urls in Google's index. The website has not formally converted to https. The https began with an error and has evolved unchecked over time. Both versions of the site (http & https) are registered in webmaster tools so I can clearly track and see that as time passes http indexation is decreasing and https has been increasing. The ratio is at about 3:1 in favor of https at this time. Traffic over the last year has slowly dipped, however, over the last two months there has been a steady decline in overall visits registered through analytics. No single page appears to be the culprit, this decline is occurring across most pages of the website, pages which traditionally draw heavy traffic - including the home page. Considering that Google is giving priority to https pages, could it be possible that the split is having a negative impact on traffic as rankings sway? Additionally, mobile activity for the site has steadily increased both from a traffic and a conversion standpoint. However that traffic has also dipped significantly over the last two months. Looking at Google's mobile usability error's page I see a significant number of errors (over 1k). I know Google has been testing and changing mobile ranking factors, is it safe to posit that this could be having an impact on mobile traffic? The traffic declines are 9-10% MOM. Thank you. ~Geo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Geosem0 -
Link to Google Places, or Google Maps?
On our contact page, we offer a link to view Google Maps for directions. I'm wondering should we be linking to our Google Places page instead, or just stick with the Google Map link? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GravitateMCC0 -
Seo for Q&A site
Hi, I am working on a newly launched Q&A site. We have very few questions and users right now and very very low seo traffic. In order to increase the number of users and seo traffic we intend to create a number of pages containing potential questions. Each page would have the following structure: Question. Ex: "What are the top wholesale suppliers of coffee in China?" Some content. Ex: Are you looking for wholesale suppliers of coffee in China? Post your question here? Question form Some additional content So there would be a page for wholesale suppliers of coffee for every country. We would publish the pages gradually and the content would be unique but yet similar (ex: only the Country changes). What do you think about this approach? Is it a good idea or can it be dangerous? We don't want to incur in any kind of penalization, we just want to give the possibility to people who are looking for specific information to find us and be able to post the request on our website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ypsilon0 -
Do sites with a small number of content pages get penalized by Google?
If my site has just five content pages, instead of 25 or 50, then will it get penalized by Google for a given moderately competitive keyword?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RightDirection0