What is the best tactic to fix thousands of product descriptions on an eCommerce site?
-
I've asked this to dozens of people already, but I still haven't found a satisfactory answer... perhaps someone here can help me:
I keep hearing how important it is to update product descriptions to avoid duplicate content, decrease thin content and improve conversion rates - but for any new eCommerce sites like ours, with thousands of listings going up at once, this is nearly impossible to control.
Outsourcing is clearly a bad idea from an SEO standpoint as well as a UX standpoint... But are there any other options? Should I let go of my other responsibilities and focuses as an in-house SEO manager and virtually stop, drop and roll out unique product descriptions? That would be a project that would take me at least a year to complete.
Do I just give up? Do two descriptions a day and hope for the best? What do you guys think? What have you recommended for others? I can't imagine our company is alone in this dilemma.
Thanks in advance!
Hanna
-
I would suggest prioritising the products and creating unique descriptions for the most important ones first.
Outsourcing them ... I would not generally say that's a bad idea as long as you ensure the work produced will be of high quality, meaning don't outsource them to India or something but maybe if the budget allows you could find a freelancer to help with the workload.
We have this issue too and some products from a previous mass upload still don't have good descriptions, but when it is a small update, we create them as required.
-
Hi.
Are you a reseller? If so, then yeah, there is no way. Especially if you get hundreds or more updates on products a month. If those products are all indeed yours, then I assume it's a large company, and then, yes, you probably should have a whole department working on that.
What I typically recommend in such cases is go by need in product rankings boost. Basically, if there is a product, which you know is not ranking good and it has not optimized description - go ahead and fix it. Sometimes it can be a set or even a category of products. And also, just as you said, do couple a day and hope for the best.
Hope it helps
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
-
Network of small sites or one large site
Hi there, I am taking a group of mums through how to set up a blog and how to build up traffic to that blog. Should I suggest that we all blog on the same domain so www.dsdsds.com/myblogname or get them to set up their own domains. My aim is for everyone to support each other, share and link content so would it be more powerful if they were all on different domains or on the same one? Would love some insight as it is something I just can not get my head around this part. Thank you so very very much 🙂
Content Development | | vcasebourne0 -
Need help deciding how to display directory listings in way Google will like best
My blog site currently has maybe 100 posts and I do about 7-8 new a week. I am creating a directory for an this site, which will end up eventually being a few hundred or more entries eventually. In the directory browse/search listing, each directory listing will have a title and a short description (one or two lines) and will show about 10-20 per page. And then the user can click an entry to see more details for the particular directory listing. This is where I have a choice, and I want to know what is the best for my site, in Google's eyes of course. Options: 1. The listing detail is displayed on a separate page. 2. The listing detail is displayed below the entry that was clicked, on the same page, by use of jquery to slide down the other content blow it to make room for it. (It actually looks slick, I've tried it). If I were writing full, unique pages for each listing detail, I'd choose option #1. But the vendors are submitting the content. It's possible they might just copy and paste their site's About page into it, or they might not even add any more detail other than their address. I can't control it. So, if going with option #1, let's say a third of the vendors add nice unique content, a third paste in some dup content, and a third just leave it blank (there would still be an address, couple line short description, and a title on the page). Would this situation be good, not good or neutral for my site? I'm not sure if adding additional pages, maybe half to two-thirds of which could be somewhat duped or of minimal word length would be bad or neutral for my site overall. As for my existing and ongoing blog pages--they are all unique, long and Google seems to love them.
Content Development | | bizzer0 -
Suggestion for E commerce Site
Hi ! We own a E-commerce Store. we have forum and blog & video too. like:- blog.store.com forum.store.com Store.com/videos Now to make it more content rich planning for Q & A on it. Do you think building one more sub-domain (answers.store.com ) is good or Folder (store.com/answers) or should use forum for this. Actually we are selling cosmetics and on chat people asking us many questions. we want to use those question as content. I'm not sure how we should manage it. Thanks
Content Development | | vinku0 -
How to handle product pages with similar information
We have thousands of product pages with similar information but differentiating variables such as length/width. Example: http://www.savvyboater.com/store/p/2100-Cover-for-V-Hull-Fishing-Boat-with-Side-Console-O-B-14-X-74-.aspx http://www.savvyboater.com/store/p/2101-Cover-for-V-Hull-Fishing-Boat-with-Side-Console-O-B-15-X-76-.aspx http://www.savvyboater.com/store/p/2102-Cover-for-V-Hull-Fishing-Boat-with-Side-Console-O-B-16-X-92-.aspx http://www.savvyboater.com/store/p/2103-Cover-for-V-Hull-Fishing-Boat-with-Side-Console-O-B-17-X-92-.aspx We built individual products instead of grouped products because we recommend specific part numbers for specific make, model, year boats through our finder tool. These pages have recently started showing up in SEOmoz as duplicate content and we are looking for solutions to solve it. We have considered creating a "parent page" that lists all sizes and then using a rel canonical on each individual page to tell google that the parent page is the preferred page. Any thoughts or other ideas on this?
Content Development | | ironpac0 -
Best way to resolve duplicate content issue?
Not sure about what to do about this - I have a client who has a ton of pages (around 1200) which are all City specific pages, for long-tail search. These are all written with paragraphs in the format such as: Order to [City] today. So every page has essentially the same content. The site also only has 1562 pages, so with 1200 of them being City-specific same-content pages, that can't be good. However the problem is that these pages still rank very well (usually Position 1 or 2) for the terms they're targeting, and bring in enough traffic and revenue to justify their purpose. We also have Country specific pages, and these are all with unique content, rather than the scripted content on the City pages. So for example, for Italy we might have: Italy Page (Unique Content) Rome (Duplicate Content) Milan (Duplicate Content) Venice (Duplicate Content) etc. (Duplicate Content) For a low traffic country (Austria), we tried to 301 the City pages to the Country page, but that only resulted in us seeing a drop in search results for the city keywords, from (usually) Position 1 to more like Page 3 or 4, so quite a drop. So, without writing 1200 pages worth of unique content, what would your advice be?
Content Development | | TME_Digital0 -
How to best take advantage of content being used on another site?
We've never syndicated content or done "article marketing". Another site contacted us and requested to use the content on several of our webpages. The other site is a fairly prestigious nonprofit in our industry. We don't mind them using our content, but we want to get the most benefit out of it. There are two ways the occur to me: Have them create pages with the exact same text as on our pages, but put in the header of those pages Just have them create pages with the text from our pages with embedded links back to our other pages. Each page they create will say "Content courtesy of XXX" Does anyone have opinions on which way is best, or another approach?
Content Development | | DanCrean0 -
4 sites - 4 keyword sets?
Hi, I have 4 domains and 4 keyword sets i.e. penny stocks mutual funds stocks day trading My question is: what is the better approach: Have each site around one set e.g. everything about "penny stocks" Site A - penny stocks Site B - mutual funds Site C - stocks Site D - day trading Create 4 categories in each website about each set of keywords? Site A - penny stocks | mutual funds | stocks | day trading and the same.. Thank you, Alex
Content Development | | pwpaneuro0 -
Blog content practices for e-commerce sites
What is the best practice in regards to content for e-commerce blogs on the same domain as the web-store (blog.storename.com)? What balance of content should be on the blog vs. the item & section pages or doesn't it matter?
Content Development | | MEldridge0