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
-
Unlimited Product Pages
While browsing through my Moz campaign, I noticed that my site is pulling up unlimited numbers of product pages even though no products appear on them. i.e. http://www.interstellarstore.com/star-trek-memorabilia?page=16 http://www.interstellarstore.com/star-trek-memorabilia?page=100 http://www.interstellarstore.com/star-trek-memorabilia?page=200 I have no ideal how to resolve this issue. I can't possible 301 an unlimited number of pages, and I can see this being a big SEO problem. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
301 from old site to new one , Should I point to home page or sub category page ?
Hey Seo Experts, I have a small website ranking for few terms like cabinets sale, buy etc . However what i have now decided is to launch a New website with more different products like living room furniture, wardrobes etc . Out of all these categories on new website Cabinets is one of the SubCategory . Now I do not want to have 2 websites . So wanted to 301 from small cabinets website to newly created website. Some of the doubts I have at the moment is ? 1 Should I REDIRECT 301 to sub category (i,e cabinets) which is purely related to Cabinets or Do a Redirect to HOME PAGE . As I also need more Authority to home page as well , as this is relatively new website ? 2 Second question related to this. If you have multiple sub domains does it divide the total authority & TF.Or it is just Ok to have multiple Sub domains if needed ? Any advice appreciated !! Thanks .
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aus00070 -
I've got duplicate pages. For example, blog/page/2 is the same as author/admin/page/2\. Is this something I should just ignore, or should I create the author/admin/page2 and then 301 redirect?
I'm going through the crawl report and it says I've got duplicate pages. For example, blog/page/2 is the same as author/admin/page/2/ Now, the author/admin/page/2 I can't even find in WordPress, but it is the same thing as blog/page/2 nonetheless. Is this something I should just ignore, or should I create the author/admin/page2 and then 301 redirect it to blog/page/2?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shift-inc0 -
With the New Panda update supposedly only weeks away, is it wise to No Index my products I have not had time to rewrite the product descriptions for ?
Hi Mozzers, I read on SEJ yesterday than apparently the Panda update was due in the 2 - 4 weeks. I still have a large of my products which I have not got around to rewriting unique product descriptions for. I know these product descriptions are duplicated on other affiliate sites so do it think it in light of the panda update coming , would it wise to put a NO INDEX Meta tag on these product pages until I get around to rewriting the descriptions. That way, I may not hit my Panda and it will buy me a bit more time. Just an idea , but thought I'd run it by. thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Schema.org on Product Page showing strange result if you post url in google
Hi All, We have implemented Schema.org for our products and currently if you put the url in google, the results showing up are not the meta description but some of the schema.org content along with some other rubbish at the bottom . Do you know if we are doing this wrong as in GWT it all looks okay and says it fine? You can get the url from here -http://goo.gl/aSFPqP Any assistance, greatly appreciated. thanks peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Product with two common names: A separate page for each name, or both on one page?
This is a real-life problem on my ecommerce store for the drying rack we manufacture: Some people call it a Clothes Drying Rack, while others call it a Laundry Drying Rack, but it's really the same thing. Search volume is higher for the clothes version, so give it the most attention. I currently have 2 separate pages with the On-Page optimization focused on each name (URL, Title, h1, img alts, etc) Here the two drying rack pages: clothes focused page and laundry focused page But the ranking of both pages is terrible. The fairly generic homepage shows up instead of the individual pages in Google searches for the clothes drying rack and for laundry drying rack. But I can get the individual page to appear in a long-tail search like this: round wooden clothes drying rack So my thought is maybe I should just combine both of these pages into one page that will hopefully be more powerful. We would have to set up the On-Page optimization to cover both "clothes & laundry drying rack" but that seems possible. Please share your thoughts. Is this a good idea or a bad idea? Is there another solution? Thanks for your help! Greg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregB1230 -
What's the best way to redirect categories & paginated pages on a blog?
I'm currently re-doing my blog and have a few categories that I'm getting rid of for housecleaning purposes and crawl efficiency. Each of these categories has many pages (some have hundreds). The new blog will also not have new relevant categories to redirect them to (1 or 2 may work). So what is the best place to properly redirect these pages to? And how do I handle the paginated URLs? The only logical place I can think of would be to redirect them to the homepage of the blog, but since there are so many pages, I don't know if that's the best idea. Does anybody have any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kking41200 -
What to do with non-existing products (removed products)?
Hello, I'm selling unique products - only one of a kind of each product.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
This means that whenever a product is sold, it is removed from display. In order not to upset Google by keep removing indexed pages I created a "sold items" page which links to all of the removed products. The problem is (or maybe it's not a problem) is that I got to the point where I have more "sold items" then existing items (and the list keeps adding up). What should I do with the non-existing items?
Was I correct? ---------------------------------------- ADDED INFO --------- The way the site is built is that I have main category pages and each of them is showing a large amount of products. Most of these products got indexed by Google. Each product has its own unique URL (Products do not return...) Once a product is sold it does not come up in the product categories - I only have a general "sold items" in the footer that shows all of them (with a lot of pagination). Since the products are rapidly changing, i thought it would upset Google to have a hundred 301 redirects in each week or two. Since the products are very similar to one another (only different measurements / colors etc.), I thought of having a link from a sold Item to a similar available item so if Google will direct someone it will probably be to the available product. The problem is that the sold items are now 4 times more than the number of available items... I don't think that a store should display 2008's t-shirts on 2012... Another problem that may rise with so many products is that I'm afraid that the one type of product that is being sold much more often will take charge at the end on the entire site since I will end up with 8,000 sold items of this product, 1000 sold items of other products and 1000 available misc products... this might also start causing duplication problems as the products are quite similar. Should I stop with the "Sold" products and use 301's? Thanks0