Curious, anyone ever had over half of their indexed links drop on an e-commerce site?
-
In a year went from around 300k indexed pages to around >100k according to GWT. Could this be duplicate content issue, lost links, spam, aged links or all of the above? either way an audit is in order. Thanks!
Chris
-
awesome and thanks! I love nashville. went to school there:)
-
By phone it is 615-678-5464, by email it is [email protected]
-
what's the best way to reach you L?
thx,
C
-
Sure. The platform I use is Prestashop. It lets you put a short description in about the manufacturer or the brand in a centralized area in the shop. I just create a new tab on the page and draw that content in programatically. So you might type up a 300 word bio about the manufacturer or use what is on their Wikipedia page, and then have that load on all of the pages for their products. You can put it in a text box so it is not obliviously seen as well.
I always generally try to put another tab as well. It is kind of a pain, but I try to type about 5 -10 different things up like "Our Return Policy" or "Why buy from us" or "Our price guarantee" Something like those and have the page choose one randomly at the render time. That way the content is always changing as well. Similar to this, http://screencast.com/t/schHrJjk It is just content to water down the feed content and make it possibly rank.
-
ok. any chance you can extend a dummies guide for that lol? i kinda follow for the most part. thanks, very very helpful L.
C
-
thank you!
C
-
There is another way too. One thing I have used to rank sites with content issues like this is to create a couple of tabs on the product pages and programatically fill them out. Say an "About {$manufacturer_name}" and a "Our Return Policy".
What you are trying to do is water down the content that is creating the duplicate. This will often work and bring the pages back into the index and ranking again.
-
Christian,
Here are your choices:
1. Rewrite the content so it is unique to your site.
OR, if that is not scalable because you have so many pages then:
2. Noindex most of those pages and allow indexation of only the ones that you have time/budget to rewrite.
Yes duplicate content is pretty rampant in eCommerce, which is precisely why Google has to handle it by choosing a canonical version and not ranking most of the others. They're not going to "ban" or "penalize" you, but ultimately the result is the same: No rankings = No Traffic.
-
well it looks like dupe content is a big issue which i am sure is pretty common in the e-commerce environment. I'm a bit fresh in the seo e-commerce as my background is more with services. I assume a stop over at Google Webmaster forum will provide some insight? thanks Lesley.
Christian
-
It could be due to any of those reasons, including others like content quality. Do you have unique product descriptions for all 300k+ pages?
-
I have seen it happen several times. Are you using a feed for your product description data? It could be an issue where a competitor has started to out rank you with the same description data and you have been dropped from the index.
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
-
Has anyone ever seen kazooisyee in their Analytics account before?
We noticed a huge spike in traffic this past Sunday and after some digging in our Analytics account, we saw that it was coming from kazooisyee (under the Network tab). This traffic had almost a 100% bounce rate and they spent an average of less than a second on our site. Does anyone know what this might be associated to? Is this one of those SEO site analysis sites? Any information on this will help a ton as my employer is rather concerned about this at the moment. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | Justine.Hedge0 -
Difference between External Followed Links and Total External Links?
Hello, could someone please elaborate on what is meant by "External Followed Links" vs. "Total External Links"? Does "External Followed Links" mean the number of links that are generating traffic to the site? Or is there some other way to conceptualize it? Any help would be appreciated! Thank you in advance.
Reporting & Analytics | | lincolndigitalgroup1 -
Links From Public Info
Hi guys, I'm conducting a link analysis for one of my websites and I have found a few potentially damaging links. However, there are some people who I have contacted about removing links who have said that they will not remove my link because they are using data that is publicly available. Is there anything I can do to get those links removed rather than diavow? Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | AAttias0 -
Megamenu: Too many links really bad?
Hi there! Our site hosts paid training videos, and has a javascript menu that lists EVERY video on the site, and it is our most-used method of navigation. The menu is structured to look like the business software our training videos cover, so it's very intuitive for users. That said, since we currently have so many videos EVERY page has more than 250 links. The only way to get this down to under 100 as SEOMOZ recommends is to delete/hide the link from being seen by search engines. What should I do? Is the menu worth being visible to search engines? businessonetraining.com
Reporting & Analytics | | TigerSheep0 -
Impression Drops Starting from June 2
In Webmaster Tools and the Linked Data in GA, we got huge bumps for some of our keywords this last week and subsequently were dropped from the face of the earth for other words were were tracking but not SEOing for. Basically for anything higher than 3rd page SERP, 30+ we were removed from Google search and we're no longer showing rankings for any of these words. Is this a new change as part of Penguin? I wonder b/c a lot of those words that were in the 60-100 in SERP were, as I mentioned, not focus SEO words but the backlinks were probably specific keywords, as we only have say 6 links and 4 are the same anchor text, this would put those words in the 60% over optimization penalty.
Reporting & Analytics | | Dweber0 -
Multi-Site Analytics Dashboards?
Anyone have recommendations on a good multi-site analytics dashboard? I am managing roughly 20 sites right now, and am looking for a dashboard that provides basic info like # of visitors, search traffic, etc. for a couple dozen sites at a glance.
Reporting & Analytics | | TakeshiYoung0 -
Automatic Checking indexation of websites
Hi Guys, do you know a tool that can check al list of websites (directorys) wich automatically checks if the website are indexed in Google. The list is very long and I would like to have a tool wich checks them all with only CnP them once. thankx a lot der.rabauke
Reporting & Analytics | | Lincus0 -
Setting up Goals in Google Analytics that involve a 3rd party site
I've set up several goals for one of my clients in Google Analytics. The ones that relate to things on the site -- such as clicking on the "Contact Us" button -- work just fine. However, I set up one that is tracking when someone clicks on a purchase button, which sends the user to a third party site (PayPal). This one doesn't seem to work. (I purchased and item and the goal was not recorded). Looking to see if I have to do anything different when setting up the goal.
Reporting & Analytics | | EricVallee340