Panda/Penguin & Ecommerce Sites in similar niches
-
Hello,
We have a few online stores that are in similar niches. How do we make sure that we don't get penalized for this (Panda/Penguin)
We have the sites interlinked, but our newest one is not going to be linked to the others.
Also, will rewriting descriptions help if the product is on more than one site?
Thanks!
-
Bob-
You probably already know this but Panda is about content quality and penguin is about link profile quality. Here is what we have done recently for some of our ecommerce clients that have come to us because they had panda or penguin update issues.
1.) Definitely need to look at your product descriptions to make them unique. We had a large client with 4 ecommerce stores and a large number of similar products that got hammered by Panda. We ended up rewriting 80% of their content related to similar products and got them back on track to almost the same exact position before the panda update. If you are in a situation where you need to prove the concept or it seems insurmountable, then just focus on rewriting descriptions for your top 100-150 products to do a mini test with the content strategy. You will see positive results or will avoid the penalty.
2.) We have worked with several ecommerce companies that have told us they dont have a large amount of "inter-linking" going on but when we did some analysis we found thousands of links between the sites they owned. Their issue was related to the fact they had several seo people that kept adding additional links between the sites without really knowing what the guy before them had done. Just make sure your interlinking doesnt look forced and it makes sense. To link a category page to a product page to a video page can make sense. To have 100 links between 2 pages on 2 different sites looks forced. Not good.
Obviously if you are creating a new site and it isnt linked to your other site, you will be avoiding any issues related to the penguin update. But if there are vaible opportunities to link between sites that isnt overdone, then dont lose that opportunity altogether.
Hope this helps. Good luck.
Mark
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
-
Staging/Development Site Indexed?
So, my company's site has been pretty tough to try to get moving in the right direction on Google's SERPs. I had believed that it was mainly due to having a shortage of back links and a horrible home page load time. Everything else seems to be set up pretty well. I was messing around and used the site: Google search operator for our staging site. I found stage.site.com and a lot of our other staging pages in the search results. I have to think that this is the problem and causing a duplicate content penalty of the entire site. I guess I now need to 301 redirect the entire site? Has anyone every had this issue before and have fixed it? Thanks for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aua0 -
Thin Content, Ecommerce & Reviews
I've been reading a lot today about thin content and what constitutes thin content. We have an ecommerce site and have to compete with large sites in Google - product pages in terms of content quantity are low and obviously competitors all have similar variations of the same product descriptions. Does Google still consider ecommerce sites as with thin content as low quality? A product page surely shouldn't have too much content which doesn't help the user. My solution to start was to get our customer reviews added to the product pages to help improve the amount of quality content on this page, then move into adding video etc when we have resource. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Spammy sites that link to a site
Hello, What is the best and quickest way to identify spammy sites that link to a website, and then remove them ( google disavow?) Thank you dear Moz, community - I appreciate your help 🙂 Sincerely, Vijay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vijayvasu0 -
Need some expert help – My Client bought out competitor and now wants to completely duplicate the current site with the same stock & categories using the Competitor brand
I am the SEO consultant for a large online homewares store. This company currently ranks very well in Google. I can PM the domain name if anyone needs however i don't want to post it on this forum. The company has bought out a competitor and plan to use the same warehouse, same products, and same back-end system as the current site, so they want to completely duplicate the current website. Titles, meta descriptions, product descriptions will all be renamed/rewritten/reworded (however keep in mind there are not many ways to reword a 3 piece saucepan set) Pricing will mostly be the same (some difference though), images cannot be renamed, categories cannot be renamed... the structure of the site will be exactly the same... placement etc. (however will have different banners, logo etc.) I personally don't believe the new site will rank, because it will be too similar. Can someone please offer me a 2nd opinion... Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ryanlenton0 -
How is my 301 redirected site stealing rankings from the main site?
Hello, I have a site, drhobelt.com, that 301 redirects to the main site, drhonow.com. Not only is drhobelt.com still indexed, but it recently stole rankings from drhonow.com for "decompression belt" related terms. What could be causing this? How do I reclaim the rankings for drhonow.com? Thanks for reading!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Thousands of /img/img/img urls generated by website - where are they coming from?
Hello -just fed website into Screaming Frog and ended up crashing computer as these img/img/img urls went into the 10s of thousands (and the numbers of img/img/img/ in each URL ended up going into the dozens and probably hundreds and more per URL). Never seen anything like it! Any idea what might be going on with this website and why it's generating so many of these URLs - it is anything to worry about? Here's example of shorter URL... www.company.com/discover/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/img/photo-competition-winners
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
News sites & Duplicate content
Hi SEOMoz I would like to know, in your opinion and according to 'industry' best practice, how do you get around duplicate content on a news site if all news sites buy their "news" from a central place in the world? Let me give you some more insight to what I am talking about. My client has a website that is purely focuses on news. Local news in one of the African Countries to be specific. Now, what we noticed the past few months is that the site is not ranking to it's full potential. We investigated, checked our keyword research, our site structure, interlinking, site speed, code to html ratio you name it we checked it. What we did pic up when looking at duplicate content is that the site is flagged by Google as duplicated, BUT so is most of the news sites because they all get their content from the same place. News get sold by big companies in the US (no I'm not from the US so cant say specifically where it is from) and they usually have disclaimers with these content pieces that you can't change the headline and story significantly, so we do have quite a few journalists that rewrites the news stories, they try and keep it as close to the original as possible but they still change it to fit our targeted audience - where my second point comes in. Even though the content has been duplicated, our site is more relevant to what our users are searching for than the bigger news related websites in the world because we do hyper local everything. news, jobs, property etc. All we need to do is get off this duplicate content issue, in general we rewrite the content completely to be unique if a site has duplication problems, but on a media site, im a little bit lost. Because I haven't had something like this before. Would like to hear some thoughts on this. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 360eight-SEO
Chris Captivate0 -
Is my site being penalized?
I launched http://rumma.ge in February of this year. Because I'm using a domain hack (the Georgian domain), I'd really like to rank for just the word "rummage". After launching, I was steady at around page 4/5 on searches for "rummage". However since then I've tumbled out of the first 100. In fact I can't even find the site in the first 20 pages on Google for that search. Even a search for my exact homepage title text doesn't bring up the site, despite the fact that the site is still in the index. I'm wondering if one of the following could be the root cause: We have a ccTLD (.ge)--not sure about the impacts of this, but seems like it might not be the root cause because we were ranking for "rummage" when we first launched. Tried running an Adwords campaign but the site was flagged as a "bridge page" (working on getting this addressed). I'm wondering if this could have carryover impacts into natural search rankings? We've tried doing some press and built up a decent number of backlinks over the past couple of months, many of which had "rummage" in the anchor text. This was all organic, but happened over the span of a month which may be too fast? Am I being penalized? Beyond checking indexing of the site, is there a way to tell if I've been flagged for some bad behavior? Any help or thoughts would be greatly appreciated. I'm really confused by this since I feel like I've been doing things right and my rankings have been travelling downward. Thanks!! Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | minouye0