Ecommerce good/bad? Showing product description on sub/category page?
-
Hi Mozers,
I have a ecommerce furniture website, and I have been wondering for some time if showing the product descriptions on the sub/category page helps the website.
If there is more content displayed on the subcategory, it should be more relevant, right?
OR does it not matter, as it is duplicate content from the product page.
I think showing the product descriptions on non-product pages is hurting my design/flow, but i worry that if I am to hide product content on sub/category pages my traffic will be hurt.
Despite my searches I have not found an answer yet.
Please take a look at my site and share your thoughts:
http://www.ecustomfinishes.com/
Chris
-
thank you everyone who contributed to this response, I found it very helpful. I will adjust my pages this morning, incase anyone checks back. If I see any dramatic SEO changes I will let you know.
Also this is my first time posting on SEOMOZ, loved it! What a cool feature.
-
Have a look at this Q&A which touches on similar points: http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-much-copy-should-there-be-on-a-category-page
I would get rid of the product descriptions on category pages - I think it is more an user-experience issues and I do think that having so much copy on the category pages it will weaken your category pages.
-
The category pages definitely don't look clean and professional right now, and that will impact conversion rate. You have enough copy on the category pages to establish relevancy, so I would be extremely surprised if your rankings went down after you stopped showing the product descriptions on the category pages.
If you're hesitant, would it be possible to test it both ways? Choose a couple of categories and pull the product descriptions off them. See what happens to their rankings and traffic.
-
I've only looked at a handful of pages / categories, but I am not sure that you are doing yourself too many favours.
In SEO terms I think that you are undermining your unique content pages. By repeating the unique content from the product pages on to the category pages you are effectively introducing duplicates. Yes, it is your own content, but spreading it across those pages is unlikely to do you many favours.
More importantly it's also pretty confusing in places. Some of those categories are quite off putting.
What would I do?
- Remove those descriptions from the cat pages
- Add category descriptions
- Try to flesh out the product descriptions with more unique content and keep an eye out for those that duplicate each other.
I hope that helps.
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
-
Is good for SEO update blog post dates after update post content
Hello I am updating some posts of my Blog, adding new and fresh content and rewriting some of the existing. After doing that I am thinking to update de post publishing so that I appears on front page of the blog and user can read ir again. But I don't know if it is good for google to change the publishing date of the post that he had indexed 5 years ago. Also I don't know if google will read it again if it is old and see the new changes in order to improve it in search results
Algorithm Updates | | maestrosonrisas0 -
Ranking impact: Traffic in website pages vs sub directory vs sub domain
Hi all, I need clarification on this. Not every time website main pages rank, some times even pages from sub directories or sub domains like blogs or guides; especially for branded keywords. I just wonder what happens when so much traffic is generating in sub directories and sub domains just because of limited landing pages in main website. Will this traffic be counted as traffic in main website as per Google? Traffic increase in main website really an ranking factor? Will the "brand + topic" related keywords' traffic is more for a website; will it ranking improves even for "topic keywords"? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Ecommerce or E-commerce as a Keyword?
I have done a good bit of research but am not sure which word to focus on. I feel that the trend is moving towards no hyphen but I do not have any data to justify that other than google trends. Here is the research I found: Google Trends says ecommerce is more popular
Algorithm Updates | | Manseo
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=e-commerce%2C%20ecommerce&cmpt=q Ngram says e-commerce
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=ecommerce%2Ce-commerce&year_start=1990&year_end=2013&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cecommerce%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ce%20-%20commerce%3B%2Cc0 Google Adwords Keyword tool says e-commerce:
e-commerce has 33,100 monthly search volume
ecommerce has 14,800 monthly search volume What do you think, will ecommerce overtake e-commerce in the future monthly search volumes? Ecommerce or E-commerce?0 -
Google is showing crazy results
Google is showing crazy results in these days sometimes my sites are on top of all keywords sometimes far behind in search engine in same day what is going on ????
Algorithm Updates | | GM0070 -
Best Practices for Page Titles | RSS Feeds
Good Morning MOZers, Quick question for the community: when creating an RSS feed for one of your websites, how do you title your RSS feed? Currently, the sites I'm managing use the 'rss.xml' for the file name, but I was curious to know whether or not it would, in any way, benefit my SERP if I were to add my domain to precede the 'rss.xml', i.e. 'my-sites-rss.xml' or something of that nature. Beyond that, are there any 'best practices' for creating RSS feed page titles or is there a preferred method of implementation? Anybody have any solutions
Algorithm Updates | | NiallSmith0 -
ECommerce site being "filtered" by last Panda update, ideas and discussion
Hello fellow internet go'ers! Just as a disclaimer, I have been following a number of discussions, articles, posts, etc. trying to find a solution to this problem, but have yet to get anything conclusive. So I am reaching out to the community for help. Before I get into the questions I would like to provide some background: I help a team manage and improve a number of med-large eCommerce websites. Traffic ranges anywhere from 2K - 12K+ (per day) depending on the site. Back in March one of our larger sites was "filtered" from Google's search results. I say "filtered" because we didn't receive any warnings and our domain was/is still listed in the first search position. About 2-3 weeks later another site was "filtered", and then 1-2 weeks after that, a third site. We have around ten niche sites (in total), about seven of them share an identical code base (about an 80% match). This isn't that uncommon, since we use a CMS platform to manage all of our sites that holds hundreds of thousands of category and product pages. Needless to say, April was definitely a frantic month for us. Many meetings later, we attributed the "filter" to duplicate content that stems from our product data base and written content (shared across all of our sites). We decided we would use rel="canonical" to address the problem. Exactly 30 days from being filtered our first site bounced back (like it was never "filtered"), however, the other two sites remain "under the thumb" of Google. Now for some questions: Why would only 3 of our sites be affected by this "filter"/Panda if many of them share the same content? Is it a coincidence that it was an exact 30 day "filter"? Why has only one site recovered?
Algorithm Updates | | WEB-IRS1 -
Product microdata from Schema.org
An article (http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2011/11/18/step-up-your-e-commerce-seo-game-with-product-microdata.aspx?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter) is claiming that using this product micro data (http://schema.org/Product) might help product pages rank better. Do you have any experience using these tags and would it be worth the time to implement these on a site with 1000's of products? Would it make sense to selectively implement them on specific products that actually have a good chance of ranking high instead?
Algorithm Updates | | pbhatt0 -
Using Brand Name in Page titles
Is it a good practice to append our brand name at the end of every page title? We have a very strong brand name but it is also long. Right now what we are doing is saying: Product Name | Long brand name here Product Category | Long brand name here Is this the right way to do it or should we just be going with ONLY the product and category names in our page titles? Right now we often exceed the 70 character recommendation limit.
Algorithm Updates | | mlentner1