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
-
New site causes massive drop off in ranking, old site restored how long to recover?
Hello, We launched and updated version of our site, mainly design changes and some functionality. 3 days after the launch we vanished from the rankings, previous page one results were now out of the top 100. We have identified some of the issues with the new site and chose to restore the old well ranking site. My question is how long might it take for the ranking to come back, if at all? The drop happened on the third day and the site was restored on the third day. We are now on day 6. Using GWT with have used fetch as Google and resubmitted the site map. Any help would be gladly received. Thanks James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesBryant0 -
Two Week eCommerce Site Migration - how to handle visibility
Good day All, We have a eComm site with over 100K pages and migrating to a new site design, new CMS and with a new URL structure for top level URLs only. Product URLs not changing (thank goodness!). We have outlined our strategy for redirects, indexation, 404s, etc. The missing piece of the puzzle is that we're only allowing 10% visitors to see new site at launch and increase visibility over two week; therefore, my question is do we not allow indexing of new site until 100% visibility to all users? How do we manage the redirects for limited visibility? My gut says don't bother for such a short period of time and block new site from SEs until 100% visibility. Since the site would be blocked how are redirects managed? Should we be using a 302 initially then switch to 301 or use a 503 code to indicate "hey, maintenance happening - come back later" with a time frame? Hope that's clear and any tips greatly appreciated. Cheers, WMCA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WMCA0 -
2 Ecommerce sites & SEO
Hi, i am managing 2 ecommerce sites that sell a lot of identical products. snowsupermarket.co.uk - public webshop shop.snowbusiness.com - trade webshop Should i optimise the 2 sites to target different keywords for all products or, should i keep the keywords the same but, vary the meta data/ description etc. to avoid duplication. Is there a clear argument to have to ecommerce websites ranking high for our products & dominating page 1, even though they will be technically competing against each other? Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SnowFX0 -
200 for Site Visitors, 404 for Google (but possibly 200?)
A 2nd question we have about another site we're working with... Currently if a visitor to their site accesses a page that has no content in a section, it shows a message saying that there is no information currently available and the page shows 200 for the user, but shows 404 for Google. They are asking us if it would be better to change the pages to 200's for Google and what impact that might have considering there would be different pages displaying the same 'no information here' message.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prospector-Plastics0 -
Website Survived Last Year Penguin & Panda Updates but dropped Jan 2013?
Hi, I have a website which was gaining good rankings through 2012 and even looked in pretty good shape after all of the Penguin and Panda updates in 2012 but in Jan 2013 the sites rankings have been very poor as it dropped for all terms. It is still in the index and webmaster tools shows the sites keywords but is showing places of 100 or so rather than 10 - 16 in the seeps. The website is www.mywebsitehosting.org Any ideas why this has dropped in January and what can I do to fix it? Thanks. P.s I have made a change to the homepage content but inner pages for the website also dropped to which have the same content as they did a few months ago.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | firebubble0 -
Sites banned from Google?
How do you find out sites banned from Google? I know how to find out sites no longer cached, or is it the same thing once deindexed? As always aprpeciate your advice everyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Separate Site or should we incorporate it into our main site
Hello, We have a website to sell personal development trainings. The owners want to start 2 blogs - one for each owner - that promotes their personal coaching practices. What's the SEO advantages of embedding both blogs in the current site vs starting 2 brand new blogs with their names as the domain names?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0