How does adding ecommerce to a site affect SEO? What are the negative and what are the positives?
-
We are thinking of adding ecommerce to our website as a service to our customers. We generate most of our leads through online quote requests but heard that it may be beneficial to our SEO if we add ecommerce for a few products. Is this true? Does anyone have tips on best and worst SEO ecommerce practices?
-
Thank you. This is helpful insight.
-
In general, my approach to ecommerce pages is to invest enough time and energy into them that they have no duplicate or thin content problems.
I try to create a generous description with facts and statistics about the item being sold. When I can't do that I might have multiple related items for sale on the same page.
I do have some retail pages that have been on my site for a long time. For those, I am working to improve them so there is very little risk of Panda problems. On a site where I did have some Panda problems, I have noindexed the problem pages until I have them improved for indexing again. I don't want to abandon these pages because I have a big investment in photography, writing, and inventory.
About 301 redirecting retail pages, yes, I do that, but I don't feel that they are really SEO assets to the site beyond being a page relevant for specific keywords. In combination with that I view each retail page as dead weight on the site that must be lifted with popular pages in my content areas.
-
Thank you for the response. As a business, and in the back end of our site, we are already set up for all things ecommerce, but have not pressed the go button yet. SEO is one consideration among many for ecommerce decisions. We are B2B so ecommerce is different for us than B2C businesses. From what I understand, you are saying that ecommerce is a neutral for SEO?
It is all in how you manage it just like any other site? My specific concern is if it is common to have duplicate content/ thin content problems with eccommerce pages. If so, would 301 redirects boost the authority of the page they go to or be a detractor?
-
**....but heard that it may be beneficial to our SEO if we add ecommerce for a few products. Is this true? **
If you start selling a few products you are going to need inventory, shopping cart, credit card processing, PCI certification, secure server, phone support, shipping containers, I could go on for a while longer...
If you want to start selling a few products because you want to get into retail then that is the right reason but if you are going this because somebody says it is good for your SEO, it might not work how they expected.
I have content websites with small stores and small retail websites with content libraries. I can tell you that the content and not the retail drives the rankings and traffic.
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
-
Could a redirecting a homepage mess with seo? if so is there any documentation you could point me too? Thanks!
I have a global page for our site but the global site has the exact same content as the main navigation personal page. If I redirect /index to /personal how much seo damage are we doing?
Web Design | | Miguelquirarte0 -
Site with no ads hit by Page Layout update?
Hi there! Can a site that has no ads on it be hit by Google's latest Page Layout update? Can it be hit for just one or two keywords? My site (www.ink2paper.com) has a decline in Google organic traffic in early Feb so my suspicion is the Page Layout update. However I have no ads on the site. Digging into GWMT I find that it is only one or 2 keywords that seems to have taken a dive, mainly [photo paper]. I used to get around 80 imps a day for this term. Then on 6 Feb it was down to 50; 7 Feb = 34; 8 Feb just 4 impressions! I got a spike back at usual levels on 10 & 11 Feb, but since then it has been back down to only 5 or so impressions a day. [photographic paper] took a small hit at the start of February, but has nose dived since the start of April. The homepage performs well for Google organic traffic - low bounce (22%) and good ecom conversion rate (14%) - although this is likely to be largely branded traffic. I feel my site is a 'good' result for the search term [photo paper], although there is always room for improvement of course! Any suggestions as to why Google has stopped showing my site for these keywords? All help is greatly appreciated. Cheers,
Web Design | | SimonHogg
Simon0 -
How Can I Make My Site iPhone Friendly?
I have been looking into making my website for iphone friendly as my analytics are not great for the iphone and I know when I try to navigate around it on an iphone it can be tough. I was told that if I make changes to the layout that it would affect my layout across everything, which I did not want to do. So I have two questions: Is this correct regarding the layout? If so, if you did something like m.waikoloavacationrentals.com which would be the mobile version how would that possibly effect your rankings with regards to the traffic distribution? Any feedback would be appreciated. Also if anyone has any experience in doing this I would be interested in discussing further.
Web Design | | RobDalton0 -
Is WP okay for E commerce sites?
Do any of you out there use wordpress for an ecommerce site? I'm getting some mixed reviews on it (but it's the internet, so that's bound to happen). Is there any sort of site traffic or page limit that would make using wordpress a bad idea? Thanks, Ruben
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
404 page not found after site migration
Hi, A question from our developer. We have an issue in Google Webmaster Tools. A few months ago we killed off one of our e-commerce sites and set up another to replace it. The new site uses different software on a different domain. I set up a mass 301 redirect that would redirect any URLs to the new domain, so domain-one.com/product would redirect to domain-two.com/product. As it turns out, the new site doesn’t use the same URLs for products as the old one did, so I deleted the mass 301 redirect. We’re getting a lot of URLs showing up as 404 not found in Webmaster tools. These URLs used to exist on the old site and be linked to from the old sitemap. Even URLs that are showing up as 404 recently say that they are linked to in the old sitemap. The old sitemap no longer exists and has been returning a 404 error for some time now. Normally I would set up 301 redirects for each one and mark them as fixed, but there are almost quarter of a million URLs that are returning 404 errors, and rising. I’m sure there are some genuine problems that need sorting out in that list, but I just can’t see them under the mass of errors for pages that have been redirected from the old site. Because of this, I’m reluctant to set up a robots file that disallows all of the 404 URLs. The old site is no longer in the index. Searching google for site:domain-one.com returns no results. Ideally, I’d like anything that was linked from the old sitemap to be removed from webmaster tools and for Google to stop attempting to crawl those pages. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | PASSLtd0 -
Technical SEO Question about TLD combined with SubDomain
I am making a new website but need to figure out the best way to do this in terms of SEO. I would like the website to have functionality of brochure website combined with an online store. My issue is that I will be using software called prestashop for my online store and CMS called MODx to develop my brochure site. (These can not be combined into one CMS). I can create brochure site with MOdx = www.example.com & then from that a subdomain using prestashop for my online store = store.example.com Can I get Google to index these as one site or would I be better off trying to get everything under the TLD. Ideally I would like just one site without subdomain Bacially what I am asking is... What are the effects of having subdomains in terms of SEO? Am I better of having everyhitng under TLD? Can I get Google to view TLD and Sub as one site? Hope this makes sense, thank you.
Web Design | | Socialdude0 -
Drop Down Menus & SEO?
Do these typically have a negative impact on SEO? I know this is kind of a vague question, does it make it harder to spider? Are there SEO friendly ways of coding these? There are so many sites out there that have these, so I've got to assume it's different on a case by case basis.
Web Design | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
What is the current thought how/if cufon affects keywords?
What is the final opinion about how (and if) cufon affects keywords in H1 tags?
Web Design | | Court_LOQUA0