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.
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
-
Sudden drop in traffic since website redesign – can't spot double firing sessions pre-update
Hi all, We launched an updated website around mid-April and have seen a long-term drop in unique page views and sessions since then. Between 25-35%. Page views returned to normal within a month, however. In terms of acquisition, we've not lost referrals or direct traffic, just organic sessions. I haven't seen any significant Google updates except for 'Fred' but that was in March (pre-website update). We did have to do some 301s and fix up an HTML and XML sitemap, etc, post launch – but that's been in place for a while now so shouldn't still have such an effect? We are also struggling with load speed at the moment, working on this at the moment. Didn't think this had a such a significant impact on ranking however. We've lost mostly non-UK traffic, especially USA. We're actually climbing rankings for a lot of new keywords I'm targeting, so I can't see how our SEO has been hampered. Frustratingly, I wasn't using Search Console or Moz Pro before this update, so can't compare much in the way of keyword traffic (I know I feel very silly now). I don't know if it's a reporting issue (I wish it was). I mean we had both GTM and GA tags on the website (I didn't know this until I looked into it) but these were present post website-launch. And I haven't found enough double firing sessions or page views to suggest we used to be getting double figures anyway. Before this, we were ranking brilliantly and getting more organic traffic than ever. All the best,
Reporting & Analytics | | landport0 -
Free Media Site / High Traffic / Low Engagement / Strategies and Questions
Hi, Imagine a site "mediapalooza dot com" where the only thing you do there is view free media. Yet Google Analytics is showing the average view of a media page is about a minute; where the average length of media is 20 - 90 minutes. And imagine that most of this media is "classic" and that it is generally not available elsewhere. Note also that the site ranks terribly in Google, despite having decent Domain Authority (in the high 30's), Page Authority in the mid 40's and a great site and otherwise quite active international user base with page views in the tens of thousands per month. Is it possible that GA is not tracking engagement (time on site) correctly? Even accounting for the imperfect method of GA that measures "next key pressed" as a way to terminate the page as a way to measure time on page, our stats are truly abysmal, in the tenths of a percentage point of time measured when compared with actual time we think the pages are being used. If so, will getting engagement tracking to more accurately measure time on specif pages and site signal Google that this site is actually more important than current ranking indicates? There's lots of discussion about "dwell time" as this relates to ranking, and I'm postulating that if we can show Google that we have extremely good engagement instead of the super low stats that we are reporting now, then we might get a boost in ranking. Am I crazy? Has anyone got any data that proves or disproves this theory? as I write this out, I detect many issues - let's have a discussion on what else might be happening here. We already know that low engagement = low ranking. Will fixing GA to show true engagement have any noticeable impact on ranking? Can't wait to see what the MOZZERS think of this!
Reporting & Analytics | | seo_plus0 -
Mysterious Referral Link
This keeps coming up in some of our top Referrals on our website in Analytics. Does anyone know what it is? We have tried researching it and have had not luck. http://vizedhtmlcontent.next.ecollege.com/
Reporting & Analytics | | TracSoft0 -
Our Firefox organic traffic seems to have been re-allocated to direct - anyone know why?!
In Google Analytic, the majority of organic traffic via Firefox browsers to one of our websites suddenly dropped off, and an immediate lift in direct traffic via Firefox browsers appeared. This trend has continued ever since. I've searched to find Firefox releases that might have affected it (eg. security/cookie settings), but haven't been able to find anything, or talk of this happening to other people, and the anomaly doesn't appear in our other website analytics either...anyone have any ideas?! The attached GA graphs show Firefox browser versions 21.0 and 22.0, but it's the same story across all versions. (You can also see that I'd also filtered out traffic via IOS 6 and Android 4 operating systems to remove any effect from these known issues). Thanks for any help that you can offer! kPRnrcd.png dy0Bjg7.png
Reporting & Analytics | | HubMDP1 -
Uptick in not tracked conversions / anyone have a list of things that google analytics will not track
There seems to have been an uptick in users on our site not being tracked in Google Analytics cause I see a lot more un-tracked revenue in the last 6 months then I used to. I know analytics is still working as it has been tracking a normal amount of visits but I assumed there might be a reason less would be actually showing up in analytics (mabye a change is what is being reported as organic). I know a lot of stuff goes into "not provided" such as logged in search and stuff like that but is there a list of all of the ones that go into not provided and all that just do not get tracked (javascript not enabled, iOS?). If it could be something else as well let me know. Thanks for the help!
Reporting & Analytics | | Gordian0 -
What is the most effective link building technique?
Hi seomoz community! My question is this: Which is more effective in a) generating traffic and b) increasing authority in the long and short term? Press releases or back-linking through blogs and forums? Some more detail: You have $6000 to spend over a 6 month period on which ever technique you choose. $6000 can buy you 20 press releases, each distributed to over 250 online news outlets (yahoo finance, td waterhouse, ABC, etc), emailed to editors of publications in your industry niche, and tweeted by 10 to-15 influential tweeters. Every release is published by the same news organization plus 5-10 new sources per release. The news organizations all have relatively high domain authorities (60-90) and generate 2500-3000 unique pageviews in total for each article. They also all link back to my site through the articles. $6000 can buy you 6 months of back-link building - outsourced overseas in India. Based on keywords that our target audience are using to find our competitors (long-tail included), we post links through blog/forum comments that appear in results when those search terms are queried. The blog/forums have varying domain authorities in our industry but none higher than 60. Again the question: Which technique is more effective in a) generating traffic and b) increasing authority in the long and short term? Press releases or back-linking through blogs and forums? My current website has a domain authority of 66. Please share your opinions or thoughts. Thanks 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | fourthdimensioninc0 -
Historical Indexation
Hello, Is there at tool to see how many pages were indexed in google for a particular website historically? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | soeren.hofmayer0 -
Links and index missing from Google Webmaster Tools!
I've been using a wordpress blog and using google analytics and webmaster tools. I'd never done very much optimizing of my site, my strategy had always been to just keep writing relevant posts and let google do the rest. At some point I installed a SEO plugin to wordpress and did a tiny amount of tweaking, but I noticed that in my webmaster tools page, all my "links to this site" links are gone! My site map says 42 pages submitted, 42 pages indexed, but all the links that I've built over the past few years are missing, and I also notice that I can't find my main landing page in the index anymore. I know there are indexed sites out there that link to me, but they aren't being reflected anymore. Did I anger google by using SEO plugins within wordpress? I'm fairly certain I wasn't doing anything sketchy. Http://brodiegraphics.com RTOH6.png
Reporting & Analytics | | HELPeR0