How does adding ecommerce to a site affect SEO? What are the negative and what are the positives?
-
We are thinking of adding ecommerce to our website as a service to our customers. We generate most of our leads through online quote requests but heard that it may be beneficial to our SEO if we add ecommerce for a few products. Is this true? Does anyone have tips on best and worst SEO ecommerce practices?
-
Thank you. This is helpful insight.
-
In general, my approach to ecommerce pages is to invest enough time and energy into them that they have no duplicate or thin content problems.
I try to create a generous description with facts and statistics about the item being sold. When I can't do that I might have multiple related items for sale on the same page.
I do have some retail pages that have been on my site for a long time. For those, I am working to improve them so there is very little risk of Panda problems. On a site where I did have some Panda problems, I have noindexed the problem pages until I have them improved for indexing again. I don't want to abandon these pages because I have a big investment in photography, writing, and inventory.
About 301 redirecting retail pages, yes, I do that, but I don't feel that they are really SEO assets to the site beyond being a page relevant for specific keywords. In combination with that I view each retail page as dead weight on the site that must be lifted with popular pages in my content areas.
-
Thank you for the response. As a business, and in the back end of our site, we are already set up for all things ecommerce, but have not pressed the go button yet. SEO is one consideration among many for ecommerce decisions. We are B2B so ecommerce is different for us than B2C businesses. From what I understand, you are saying that ecommerce is a neutral for SEO?
It is all in how you manage it just like any other site? My specific concern is if it is common to have duplicate content/ thin content problems with eccommerce pages. If so, would 301 redirects boost the authority of the page they go to or be a detractor?
-
**....but heard that it may be beneficial to our SEO if we add ecommerce for a few products. Is this true? **
If you start selling a few products you are going to need inventory, shopping cart, credit card processing, PCI certification, secure server, phone support, shipping containers, I could go on for a while longer...
If you want to start selling a few products because you want to get into retail then that is the right reason but if you are going this because somebody says it is good for your SEO, it might not work how they expected.
I have content websites with small stores and small retail websites with content libraries. I can tell you that the content and not the retail drives the rankings and traffic.
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
-
Multiple Sites for an Attorney Practicing Different Areas of Law
Hello, I'm trying to make sure I give a potential client the correct advice. This person is an attorney whose current site ranks well. The site deals solely with his traffic ticket defense practice. He's considering building a new site to highlight his personal injury practice but is unsure whether to build an altogether new site or redesign his current site in such a way that it includes his personal injury practice along side his traffic ticket defense practice. Obviously he doesn't want to lose his current rankings, but my concern is that he'll actually dilute his rankings somewhat with the multiple sites. Both practices have pretty different sets of keywords they would need to rank for, with pretty different difficulty levels. Any advice? Thanks.
Web Design | | lawfather2 -
Community Discussion: UX & SEO – Your experience?
We've been looking at the relationship between SEO & UX a bit more closely lately on the blog. Our good pal Cyrus started the wheels turning with a tweet: https://twitter.com/CyrusShepard/status/748296076411625473 ...and that morphed into a Whiteboard Friday idea, which was filmed and posted here: https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/ux-vs-seo-whiteboard-friday We shared the story of one site that enjoyed rapid growth and that subsequently battled with managing that UX/SEO relationship on Thursday. And it's hard, right? UX and SEO teams often operate independently of one another, and may make decisions that affect one another's work. Sometimes it's a "hindsight is 20/20" situation. Sometimes the answer is so radical and impactful that you may want to settle for a "safe" alternative. I'd imagine many of you have encountered some big issues with user experience and search optimization in your day-to-day over the years. What's the most difficult situation you've encountered with this? How did you resolve it? (I'd bet money on there being some really creative solutions out there :). Is there a particularly challenging situation you're struggling with now that you'd want to share & crowdsource ideas for?
Web Design | | FeliciaCrawford3 -
Thoughts on our Agency Site
Hi all, We'd all welcome opinions on our digital agency site http://www.newbrandvision.com/. We are in the planning stage of launching a new site; and we'd welcome any UX or SEO thoughts. It's a strange one but our agency has been around since 2002, and we operate in the heart of London; however we don't rank anywhere near the first page for "digital agency in London" or any long-tail /semantics around this. We feel that it's pretty clear from search and when landing on the site what we are; but would welcome any general thoughts as to why we aren't ranked that highly. Much appreciated!
Web Design | | Tangent0 -
How to link to a site without passing ANY linkjuice (other than simply nofollowing)
I have heard that there are other ways of linking to a site, to completely avoid passing any seo value I think it was even in a whiteboard friday video where I saw Rand say something about doing a 307 "temporary" redirect, or something like that? Basically, I want to let my customers compare our prices with ebay, but I don't want to have ebay outrank us (for obvious reasons) Any help?
Web Design | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Rel Canonical tag usage on ECommerce website
Hello, I have read up on the rel canonical tag and I'm ready to apply it to my site's categorization structure. However, I'm concerned that, because my website does not have a "view all" button for our product pages, the rel canonical tag would not be appropriate. For example, if you come to my site's main category url, you come to mysite.com/main-category At this level - you get the top 12 items in the category. if you want to see the next page, you click a crawlable link that goes to mysite.com/main-category12-24 etc. etc. The site does not offer a view all function. Would applying the rel canonical tag be appropriate in this instance, or do I have to let Google crawl and index each page independantly? Thanks.
Web Design | | Blenny0 -
Mobile Site Pages: Word Count Help
Hi there I am doing a mobile website for a client and they asked me what the dieal word count would be per page. They are SEO conciosu but we are not doing SEO on this site. I would just like to know a general rule of thumb. Regards Stef
Web Design | | stefanok0 -
Flat vs. Silo Site Architecture, What's Better
I'm in the midst of converting a fairly large website (500+ pages) into WordPress as a content management system. I know that there are two schools of thought regarding site architecture: Those who believe that everything should be categorized, I.E.- website.com/shoes/reebok/running People who believe that the less clicks it takes from the homepage the better. As it stands, our current site has a completely flat architecture, with landing pages being added randomly to the root, I.E.- website.com/affordable-shoes-in-louisville-ky I'm beginning to think that there is a gray area with this. I spoke to someone who says that you should never have a page more than 2 categories/subfolders deep. But if we plan on adding a lot of content doesn't it make sense to set the site up into many categories so we can set a good foundation for adding massive amounts of content. Also, will 301 redirecting to the new structure cause us to lose rankings for certain terms? Any help here is appreciated.
Web Design | | C-Style0 -
Infinite scrolling - is it SEO friendly ?
If i am trying to implement infinite scrolling and remove pagination completely, will it effect my SEO ? Why or why should not infinite scrolling be implemented ?
Web Design | | Myntra0