Conveying Farmer Update To Client
-
I work with a site that saw their super competitive top terms drop off page one with the Farmer update. So, #4 to #12.... that kinda thing.
In the last year they've added a huge catalog of 500,000 item pages. The catalog has climbed to a 76% bounce rate, where as the handful of top pages is in the 20s +/-.
To date, I haven't had much of anything to do with the catalog.
That makes for a sitewide average bounce rate of almost 70% which has almost doubled in the past year as the catalog has ramped up. The catalog gets a ton of search traffic and sells a lot of items via that organic traffic.
I'm advocating for a variety of measures, including cleaning up the catalog:
-
301ing out of stock pages to the homepage
-
301ing 100% bounce rate pages who've had hundreds/thousands of visits over time..
-
Improving the user experience.
-
Offering rainchecks for out of stock items.
They generally don't believe that the huge bounce rate (bad user experience stats) is hurting their top terms on their top pages. They see it as two different issues.
Any thoughts on how to present evidence that the catalog is the culprit? In researching it, I found these two quotes:
"In particular, it's important to note that low quality pages on one part of a site can impact the overall ranking of that site," the Google spokesman said.
and...
"Google spokesman told PCMag that sites that believe they have been adversely impacted should "extensively evaluate their site quality."
Not only that, but the item descriptions are straight from the manufacturer, so the pages aren't that unique text-wise.
Any industry standard on catalog page bounce rates?
Not that it's the only possible area of SEO improvement, because it's not. I thought those quotes were pretty conclusive, but I guess not. Is there some straight-from-Google additional info to suport this? Or, am I just wrong to focus on user experience... bounce rate, pages, time on site, etc?
Thanks!
- Mike
-
-
You think the catalog duplicate content hurt the top terms on different pages?
I can't see how I would replace the manufacturer's description on a half million items/pages. Do you?
-
The Panda update had nothing to do with bounce rate and everything to do with shallow and duplicate content. If you feel your content is not shallow, low quality or copied, then your rankings dropped because you may have had a lot of links from websites there were shallow, low quality or copied. If the pages don't have unique text, then that right there could have hurt you. I would advocate putting unique, relevant, original text on all these catalog pages.
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
-
Our site dropped by April 2018 Google update about content relevance: How to recover?
Hi all, After Google's confirmed core update in April 2018, we dropped globally and couldn't able to recover later. We found the update is about the content relevance as officially stated by Google later. We wonder how we are not related in-terms of content being ranking for same keywords over years. And we are expecting to find a solution to this. Are there any standard ways to measure the content relevancy? Please suggest! Thank you
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Was there a recent secret Panda update? Help.
Our site http://www.entrepreneurhandbook.co.uk has had a fairly significant drop in organic traffic this past week. Going from 3.8k to 3.k Can't see any reported updates on the major SEO websites, we'd had steady growth all year then appear to have back-peddled. One post in particular, our UK venture capital list was page1 for a number of VC related keywords such including 'venture capital' (google.co.uk) but it's completely dropped out of the index for that one and others. Does anybody have any ideas? We haven't done any link building at all, we've focussed entirely on on-site SEO and high quality in depth articles/posts/lists and historically we've always seen small increases at every algo update. 2CG25iv
Algorithm Updates | | entrepreneurhandbook0 -
Penguin 3.0 Site Dropped after Update
Hi We was hit by the Penguin update a long time ago and we lost a lot of traffic/positions because of this. For a long time we worked really hard to identify all off our links that may have caused us to recieve this penalty. After Months of work we submitted the disavow file and reconsideration request and in June 2014 we recieved confirmation from google in webmaster tools that the manual spam action had been revoked. over time we then started to recieve more traffic and better positions in the serps, however since penguin 3.0 we have dropped again for a range of keywords. many going from page 1 to 2 or page 2 to 3/4 Any ideas what we should do here , any help will be really appriciated as I'm totally confused We havent done any link building at all since the penalty / recovery
Algorithm Updates | | AMG1000 -
Yandex Algorithim Update?
I have 2 RU websites. One is my main site www.xxx.com saw big increases in rankings + visits last week. My geo-specific subsite, www.xxx.ru generally ranks better but did not change last week. Any insights about why this occurred?
Algorithm Updates | | theLotter0 -
Meta Keywords ... Client request
I have a client who would like to include Meta Keywords in their site as they have seen competitors with it, we haven't used Meta Keywords tag before as doesn't impact ranking as we all know - however if I am to put them in - is there a limit - would 200 + negatively impact the site? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | lauratagdigital0 -
Should I Wait Until the "Dust Settles" on the Algorithm Update or Get Busy Now?
We were hit hard on both of our sites yesterday and can't afford to wait for the dust to settle, as some folks are advising. We have been attempting to work off a penalty on one of our sites by undergoing a massive (and expensive) link removal project over the last four months. We are on our third reconsideration request and, hopefully, this last round of link removal will have done the job. I'm hesitant to go in and "de-optmize" the site by changing title tags and changing the anchor text until the penalty is removed, but I'm not sure if that's the right plan of action. I am, however, going to dig into the non-penalized site and change some title tags and anchor text. Any thoughts on this strategy would be greatly appreciated.
Algorithm Updates | | rdreich490 -
Why is my client's website, ranking higher for serps on bing and yahoo for competitive keywords
My client is in the competitive Private jet charter space. Why is my client's website, ranking higher for serps on bing and yahoo for competitive keywords phrases? like Private jet charter as an example. http://www.jetcharter.com/
Algorithm Updates | | AndrewSEO0 -
Were you affected by the "Farmer Update?" What are you doing about it?
I woke up on Friday morning to see that my traffic from Google on Thursday was down 30% on one of my sites. Traffic hasn't bounced back, and I'm wondering why I've been lumped in with the content farms. My site only has original, high quality content. It has a great link profile with tons of links from .edu page, and I've always played by Google's rules. I can't understand why my site has been negatively affected, which makes it hard to do something about it. Right now, the only thing that I can come up with is to work really hard at building more links. Were you affected? What are you doing about it?
Algorithm Updates | | WillyF0