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 lesley@dh42.com
-
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
-
UTM Links Showing Up as Separate Pages in Google Analytics
Hey everyone, I was just looking at landing pages in Google Analytics, and in addition to just the URL of the landing page, the UTM links are being listed as separate pages. Is this normal? I anticipated seeing the landing page URL and then using the secondary dimension to see source/medium. If this isn't normal, what would I check next?
Reporting & Analytics | | rachelmeyer0 -
Multiple GA codes, one site.
Hi all, Is anyone running two GA codes on one website successfully? My organisation own a number of websites so we used to have one global GA code on all our sites to track global stats, and then we would also have site unique GA on each property to just track that one property. This worked fine, but of late we seem to be getting no data from the globally based code. Obviously, with the site-specific codes we can enter the name for that domain in GA but for the overall code, it is called 'all.com' I'm wondering if Google has now tied the GA domain to the code or if we are doing something wrong. All the codes are the same as they always were but have stopped working. As a stop gap, we have swapped to using Piwik as the all.com code. However, we are then comparing the stats in two different analytics programs so will get a different result. Also, it would be nice to be able to add the all.com to tools such as this to generate weekly reports. Anyone else having GA woe like this? Thanks. Carl
Reporting & Analytics | | WonkyDog0 -
Hi - I have a beginner question about organic search results dropping to zero
Really confused about a site I'm getting going on SEO with... I'm new to SEO, but I've found that the organic search results for princessdesign.co.uk have dropped to zero dramatically. I'm concerned that I've missed something and hope that somebody out there might be able to help? Any input greatly appreciated 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | Gokart0 -
Drop in direct traffic & spike in Adwords, any relation?
So I noticed a significant (around 50%) drop in Direct traffic in analytics to one of my websites (compared to last month). I've also noticed a spike in Adwords for around the same number of sessions. The drop in traffic is pretty much isolated to one specific page, and it is the same page involved in the spike in Adwords. Is it possible that Google was not recognizing a portion of the Adwords traffic? That's the only theory I have, but we haven't changed anything with their tracking or Adwords, so I'm a little hesitant to go with that theory.
Reporting & Analytics | | KiyoW0 -
Does this traffic drop look like Penguin to you?
Dear Community In early October, I noticed a sharp drop of the rankings of the main KW of a website I manage: idee-sol.fr. This, of course I immediatelly attributed to penguin 2.1. While researching on the experience other webmasters have had with this unfortunate situation, I noticed that most of them had very sharp drops of traffic in a relatively small time, e.g.: a drop of 80% in a couple of days. But on idee-sol, the drop looks less steep yet equally worrying. Was the cause of this traffic/ranking drop due to penguin 2.1 exclusively or to penguin + something else (or not penguin at all?) I'm including an image of the "non paid search" report of analytics. dPnphnr
Reporting & Analytics | | Masoko-T0 -
Has anyone attended or hired anyone from Full Sail University? Or schools offering Internet Marketing or SEO
We are actively looking for a couple of positions. A qualified SEM (for PPC, etc) pro that has experience with Google but also others including BING and Yahoo. And a good SEO person who gets it is about delivering a result and not blowing sunshine up someone's skirt or pant leg.
Reporting & Analytics | | RobertFisher
That said I got a resume the other day from a guy and he stated he had a Master's Certificate in Internet Marketing from Full Sail University. I looked them up and they offer a Bachelors Degree and a Masters Degree in Internet Marketing. They also offer a certificate in Internet marketing they call a Master's certificate. So, I set a time for him to call me as I was mildly skeptical.
When I started asking about the certificate (His LinkedIn page had Masters Degree in IM) he said he had taken the certificate and I did not pursue the LinkedIn. I asked how long he was in school for the certificate and he stated 6 months (curriculum is 4 months and is fairly t h i n.
I asked what he had done and he had completed an Internship with a Texas company and helped a construction firm move to page one. When I asked how he started telling me about inserting keywords in the meta tag field in the CMS..... He did not know what a title tag was, knew nothing of content, H1, H2, Local Optimization and then wanted to tell me how when you put their Domain name in google they are number two on page One. So you get it, I believe. I am just really frustrated with the whole "certification" etc. thing and believe we do need it. Market Motive is as close to good as I can see, but I would love to hear from you. (Note on MM- I do not like the if you pay monthly you get Provider or whatever but it you shell out $3500 you are a Master. Just doesn't feel right to me. And, I did speak with someone a while back with a masters from them and again, I scratched my head). Would just like to hear of your experience and if anyone has hired from these schools with success.0 -
Will Bing/Google's engine index a page that has only been on social media?
Will Bing's engine index and rank a page that has only been seen on social media and has no inbound links? Will Google's? Are inbound links absolutely required to get a page indexed and ranking and getting traffic? If unknown, how would you go about testing this?
Reporting & Analytics | | SarahGoliger0 -
Does an internal link inside an iframe result in a bounce?
We built a landing page with a wufoo form. Inside the wufoo form is a link going to another page on our website. We are wondering if clicking on that link will result in a bounce since it is in an iframe. We are using google analytics.
Reporting & Analytics | | seozachz0