ECommerce Websites and Recommendations for Dealing With Google Panda

Google's Panda Update Left Many Website Owners Sad & Confused

Google always strives to provide the highest quality results to its users with every update; unfortunately, with every update, some websites end up as collateral damage. While Google does adjust and fine tune the algorithms, that’s not much consolation to site owners who have seen their traffic plummet. In this post I’m going to be looking at ECommerce websites, some problems that these website owners might have, and some steps they can take to correct the problems.

One of the biggest issues ECommerce websites must tackle is duplicate content or nearly duplicate content. Many merchants simply take a data feed from their suppliers or vendors, copy and paste it into their database or CMS, and go about their business. This may work for large brands or well-known websites, but for most websites this is no longer really a viable strategy. If the search engines see large portions of your website are duplicated across the web, this isn’t a signal of quality. Another way to think of it is to pretend that Google was your High School English teacher. When your friend turns in his paper, the teacher loves it and gives him an A+. You decide to take his paper, change a few sentences, put it in a different report cover, and turn it in. It’s pretty unlikely you’ll get an A+. In fact, it’s highly likely you’ll get F and get told to stay after class for “a talk” with the teacher.

Google thinks the same way as your English teacher. They don’t want to see the same content over and over, even if it is really good. In an ideal world you would rewrite each product name and description to make them unique; however, that’s not always a real world solution. What you should do is start with your highest profit products or the products with the most demand and absolutely rewrite those, making them as unique as possible. There are many different copywriting services available even if you are on a tight budget such as ODesk, TextBroker, MadContent, ELance, and MTurk. If you don’t have the budget to create unique content for your “best” products, there may be something wrong with your business model.

Maybe you can afford to have the content rewritten, but you realize it’s going to take some time. The best thing to do during the interim period is to “hide” the duplicate content from Google. When I say “hide,” I don’t mean that in a “bad” way that violates search engine guidelines with something like cloaking. What I mean is tell Google “Hey, I know I have problem over here, so please don’t look at it.” It’s almost the same way you make sure you keep the door to a messy teenager’s room closed when you have house guests. The best way to do this is to use the noindex/follow meta tags on the products that you are waiting to update the content for. By doing this, you won’t rank for that product, but you are also telling Google to not “count it against you,” which in many cases will help you.  You can also use this strategy on low profit products where it simply doesn’t make sense to invest in having the content rewritten. Customers can still browse and find it on your website, they just won’t come directly there from a search engine.

Another thing that you can do to make your product pages more unique is to add reviews. The best reviews are going to be those submitted by actual customers who have used the products in the past or who recently purchased them. One of the most effective ways to get this type of content is to ask for it from the customers a few days after you know the product has been delivered. If you provide them with an incentive such as free shipping, discount on future orders, or a chance to win a gift certificate, you will probably get a much higher response rate. If you have a large email database of existing customers, fans on Facebook, or followers on Twitter, you can use these methods to get customer reviews as well.  If you are going to go through the trouble of getting reviews, it’s worth the time to format it with the new Schema.org review markup, so search engines will give you rich snippet listings.

One of the biggest mistakes people make when adding reviews to their website is adding the reviews to separate pages and not directly on the product pages. Unless you are trying to rank for “<product name> reviews,” you aren’t maximizing the unique content you just added unless you put it directly on the product page. What many merchants will do to try to rank for both the product name and the review searches is show the 5-10 most recent or most helpful reviews on the product page and create a separate page with all of the archived reviews. Each situation is different, so you’ll have to decide which works best for you depending on how many reviews you have.

Another problem many merchants have is they have created an “infinite” website. When they have old products that are discontinued or that they no longer sell, they don’t remove them from the website. Instead, they just “bury” them deep on the website. But each website has a finite number of links, and those links each pass along a little strength to the website they link to. If you take a finite amount of link equity or “link juice” and divide it up amongst an “infinite” number of pages, you’ll end up with a bunch of pages that aren’t “strong” enough to rank for anything. So when you have products that you don’t carry anymore and aren’t coming back, it’s usually a good idea to remove them. The best thing to do is set up a 301 redirect for the products you remove to a similar product, replacement product, or product category.

While these aren’t all of the problems that ECommerce merchants will have in the eyes of Google, they are the most common and the easiest to fix, so let’s recap.

• Look at your existing product titles and descriptions. Are they unique to your website or are they duplicated across the web.
• If they are duplicated, prioritize them and begin rewriting the descriptions and titles to make them as unique as possible.
• Block the search engines from “seeing” duplicate content using noindex/follow meta tags.
• Look for ways to add more unique content to your product pages with things like reviews from experts or customers.
• Look at how many reviews you are going to have. If you can obtain a critical mass, create separate review pages; otherwise keep the review data on the product page.
• Keep the size of your website manageable by removing old or discontinued products.

photo credit: Photospin