Product Pages & Panda 4.0
-
Greeting MOZ Community:
I operate a real estate web site in New York City (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). Of the 600 pages, about 350 of the URLs are product pages, written about specific listings. The content on these pages is quite short, sometimes only 20 words.
My ranking has dropped very much since mid-May, around the time of the new Panda update. I suspect it has something to do with the very short product pages, the 350 listing pages.
What is the best way to deal with these pages so as to recover ranking. I am considering these options:
1. Setting them to "no-index". But I am concerned that removing product pages is sending the wrong message to Google.
2. Enhancing the content and making certain that each page has at least 150-200 words. Re-writing 350 listings would be a real project, but if necessary to recover I will bite the bullet.
What is the best way to address this issue? I am very surprised that Google does not understand that product URLs can be very brief and yet have useful content. Information about a potential office rental that lists location, size, price per square foot is valuable to the visitor but can be very brief. Especially listings that change frequently. So I am surprised by the penalty.
Would I be better off not having separate URLs for the listings, and for instance adding them as posts within building pages? Is having separate URLs for product pages with minimal content a bad idea from an SEO perspective?
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can recover from this latest Panda penalty?
Thanks, Alan
-
Hi Alan,
Handling a Google penalty is a delicate issue as there are a lot of factors that need to be considered to assess the penalty on the site accurately. It is not a black and white issue where there is one right answer and doing that will fix the issues and lift the penalty. The whole process includes an in depth analysis of the site including the on page and off page factors. I would really suggest you to consider hiring an expert on this subject and have them do a thorough evaluation and provide recommendations. I've included links to some resources below that you might find helpful.
Recover from a Panda Penalty - QuickSprout
Cheers,
SEO5..
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
-
Images on their own page?
Hi Mozers, We have images on their own separate pages that are then pulled onto content pages. Should the standalone pages be indexable? On the one hand, it seems good to have an image on it's own page, with it's own title. On the other hand, it may be better SEO for crawler to find the image on a content page dedicated to that topic. Unsure. Would appreciate any guidance! Yael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater1 -
Magento 1.9 SEO. I have product pages with identical On Page SEO score in the 90's. Some pull up Google page 1 some won't pull up at all. I am searching for the exact title on that page.
I have a website built on Magento 1.9. There are approximately 290,000 part numbers on the site. I am sampling Google SERP results. About 20% of the keywords show up on page 1 position 5 thru 10. 80% don't show up at all. When I do a MOZ page score I get high 80's to 90's. A page score of 89 on one part # may show up on page one, An identical page score on a different part # can't be found on Google. I am searching for the exact part # in the page title. Any thoughts on what may be going on? This seems to me like a Magento SEO issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CTOPDS0 -
SEO Impact & Google Impact On Removing Product From Category Page for Ecommerce Site
Hello Experts, For my Ecommerce site previously I was showing products at category pages i.e. first all subcategories name after that list all products of all subcateogries. That also approx per category 500 products via load more feature. My query is now I am planning to show products only at Product Listing Page and not on Category pages so what will be SEO impact and how google will treat this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Johny123450 -
Does it make sense to create new pages with friendlier URLs then redirect old pages to new?
Hi Moz! My client has messy URLs. does it make sense to write new clean URLs, then 301 redirect all old URLs to the new ones? Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Do you know a case where product variations caused panda?
Would like to add 300 products to ecommerce site of which 150 products are just variations in different colors. In this particular case there are some reaons for: Not writing partially unique product descriptions for each product variation Not setting them up as variations on one product page So I would have several product pages with nearly identical product descriptions (proprietary description written by us), just name of color in title and description and EAN in description being different, as well as over time different user generated content showing up. Also different product images used. I would not mind if google would not index some product variations. Do you think I should be concerned about Panda? Do you know any website which had a Panda problem caused by product variations? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Are these doorway pages?
I've added category pages for counties/town on http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com but will google see these as doorway pages? If you click on categories from the menu at the top and view some of the pages you'll hopefully see what I mean? Should I continue building these or delete them? Any advice appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Did adding product videos cause my products to lose #1 position?
I work on an e-commerce site and for many of the products we sell, we rank #1 for "product name + item number" related searches. We decided to add product videos to some of our products in the hopes of getting an additional listing in the SERP's (regular listing + video listing in universal video results) Instead.. What we've noticed is that sometimes we are not getting 2 listings but just a regular listing with a video thumbnail that ranks somewhere on the middle of the first page. The video thumbnail is great.. but I'd rather the #1 position. I don't think Google likes to show video results as the #1 position for obvious product searches. What do you think? Did we lose our #1 position because of adding the videos to our product pages? Any advice or similar experiences? ~~ Additional information: On some of those queries, Google had decided to ignore our video and we have maintained our #1 ranking. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebstaurantStore.com0 -
We are changing ?page= dynamic url's to /page/ static urls. Will this hurt the progress we have made with the pages using dynamic addresses?
Question about changing url from dynamic to static to improve SEO but concern about hurting progress made so far.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | h3counsel0