To list or not to list? Products that contain basic info only, yet show off product depth...
-
Some of our products on our site only have 40 characters of description... each item/category is it's own unique web page with basic info like Brand, Model, What it is, Price, & Quantity in stock. For searchers knowing what they want, they can quickly find us via the basic info & see that we have it in stock. But for someone surfing our site, it's not all that attractive or informative as you are scrolling down the category list. Collecting the picture & info can be a slow and time consuming process, but something we'd love to be all caught up on one day. Would it be wiser to take these pages off, or keep them on until they are fully updated with pic & more detail?
(My thought is that even though they don't contain a lot of individual detail depth, they still add a substantial quantity of basic related content to the category page that they reside in. This basic info on these items are also given a chance to burn into the web search engines over a longer period of time. As time goes by and their content is improved, they will get re-crawled/re-indexed with their new information depth. Also, even though they don't look all that pretty, it shows off our product depth... if we only listed the items that looked spectacular, then a lot of our categories would only contain a wimpy 3 out of 30 items that we actually have for sale. That feels like a huge misrepresentation of how much selection we actually have to offer. But perhaps this is wrong thinking?) Thanks, Kevin
-
Some of our products on our site only have 40 characters of description...
If this information is all you got on a single page - and you have a lot of these pages - then you need to fix this or you will be hit by a Panda problem.
Since about two years ago Google has been demoting the entire site in the rankings if you have a lot of these pages. I have pages with short content and they have been noindexed. I am slowly writing substantive content for these (250 words to 500 words) and when that goes live I start getting long tail traffic and rank much higher than they were originally.
This is long boring work. I have these pages prioritized by potential income and plug away at writing them a few each week.
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
-
How does product category description affect SEO?
Hi - we are a website that sells tours. We have category pages that list the tours in that category (by city, by length of time, theme, etc). At the top of each category page, before the buttons linking to the tours, there is a category description. It is a pretty long paragraph. We are redesigning the website and think it would look nicer to show 2-3 lines of text and then have a down arrow and 'read' more so people can click and it would expand to show the full category description if they want to read it and it won't take up so much room that way. My question is - will this affect SEA at all? Or because the text is still there, just hidden, it won't do anything? Our site ranks very high in organic searches on google and we do not want to do anything that will hurt SEO. thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shirapn0 -
Product page as homepage
Hello, Is it ok that to use the homepage of website as a product page directly where you present all your products on your homepage or can it penalise you to do that ? and in that case, is it better to have a homepage that you don't rank and create a subpage for your product page. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Best Practices for Title Tags for Product Listing Page
My industry is commercial real estate in New York City. Our site has 300 real estate listings. The format we have been using for Title Tags are below. This probably disastrous from an SEO perspective. Using number is a total waste space. A few questions:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
-Should we set listing not no index if they are not content rich?
-If we do choose to index them, should we avoid titles listing Square Footage and dollar amounts?
-Since local SEO is critical, should the titles always list New York, NY or Manhattan, NY?
-I have red that titles should contain some form of branding. But our company name is Metro Manhattan Office Space. That would take up way too much space. Even "Metro Manhattan" is long. DO we need to use the title tag for branding or can we just focus on a brief description of page content incorporating one important phrase? Our site is: w w w . m e t r o - m a n h a t t a n . c o m <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Turnkey Flatiron Tech Space | 2,850 SF $10,687/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Gallery, Office Rental | Midtown, W. 57 St | 4441SF $24055/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Open Plan Loft |Flatiron, Chelsea | 2414SF $12,874/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Tribeca Corner Loft | Varick Street | 2267SF $11,712/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| 275 Madison, LAW, P7, 3,252SF, $65 - Manhattan, New York |0 -
Should we be showing last modified date for each page in our sitemap?
We're not currently displaying the last modified date in our sitemap, e.g.: <url><loc>http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/about-our-charity</loc></url> Are their any advantages to including this data? One benefit that occurred to us is that it will enable Google to determine which pages have fresh content and which are therefore worth crawling, helping Google index beneficial changes quicker. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SOS_Children1 -
PDF Cached by Google, but not showing as link
The following pdf is cached by google: http://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/files/REFERRAL%20LIST%20OF%20BOND%20AGENCIES_Florida.pdf However, OpenSiteExplorer is not listing any of the links as found in it. With such an authoritative site, I would think Google would value this, right? None of the sites listed rank well though and OpenSiteExplorer's inability to see the links makes me wonder if Google provides these sites any value at all. Is there any link juice or brand mention value here for Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
How to title my products?
Hi, really struggling with product titles. Or should I say keeping staff writing out titles. If I sell a Coat. I would like the product titled like: Armani Jeans Coat Green but staff are doing it like Armani Jeans Fur Hooded Coat Green. Now I think this effects our SEO efforts as how likely are people to search for the Fur Hooded coat part? Yes we might hit the numbers of the small search but is it really worth it? Would it not be best put this Fur Hooded part in the short description and long description? I am trying to make my SEO titles and meta descriptions consistant for 1 product. But find it hard writing out Fur Hooded in the Meta Title when I know numbers will be minimal? The SEO titles or the product titles are effectively links on the website for each product. So hold more weight and the product titles act as the H1 titles on the product page itself. Surely we would be best using Armani Jeans Coat Green rather than such a long, obscure title that will gain very little search? Whats best way to approach this issue? As we can have products titled like: Creative Recreation Kaplan Patent Leather/Snake Trainers Charcoal. Which to me is too long, too obscure. Surely the extra detail should go in Short Description which is visible on the catelog page and keep the product titles shorted and more to the point, eg Creative Recreation Kaplan Trainers Snake Charcoal? All this Patent Leather/ business seems pointless to me? Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0 -
Google Webmaster Now Shows YourMost Recent Links
I just saw this story today about a new Google Webmaster feature which lets you download a file of the most recent links. http://searchengineland.com/google-now-shows-you-your-most-recent-links-127903 I downloaded the file today and I already discovered a major site issue. Our site blog was completely duplicated on a secondary domain we own and Google was showing that site as recent links. I already emailed the dev team to fix this pronto. Anybody else using this new feature and perhaps can share if it helps you in any way.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw1 -
Duplicity Problems - What to do with similar products in e-commerce?
Hello, I have an eCommerce website with hundreds of similar products. On some occasions, besides for their measurements they are completely identical. The titles are kept different by using the stock reference and the meta descriptions also use their measurements. However, I'm gettingDuplicate Page Content errors by the MOZ crawler. This is more than understandable since the products are very similar -
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
WHAT SHOULD I DO??? I noticed a similar situation in BlueNile (the diamond ecommerce site) - They have numerous almost identical pages, see example: http://www.bluenile.com/round-diamond-1-carat-or-less-ideal-cut-g-color-vs1-clarity_LD02424873 http://www.bluenile.com/round-diamond-1-carat-or-less-ideal-cut-g-color-vs1-clarity_LD02430168 For some reason, they did on each page a canonical to it's self... I wanted to add... It is impossible to add different descriptive texts due to the amount of products and to the rapidness they are sold (each product is unique - similar to the diamonds in the BlueNile example).0