Curious, anyone ever had over half of their indexed links drop on an e-commerce site?

[Sundance_Kidd]

In a year went from around 300k indexed pages to around >100k according to GWT.  Could this be duplicate content issue, lost links, spam, aged links or all of the above? either way an audit is in order. Thanks!

Chris

[Sundance_Kidd]

awesome and thanks! I love nashville. went to school there:)

[LesleyPaone]

By phone it is 615-678-5464, by email it is lesley@dh42.com

[Sundance_Kidd]

what's the best way to reach you L?

thx,

C

[LesleyPaone]

Sure. The platform I use is Prestashop. It lets you put a short description in about the manufacturer or the brand in a centralized area in the shop. I just create a new tab on the page and draw that content in programatically. So you might type up a 300 word bio about the manufacturer or use what is on their Wikipedia page, and then have that load on all of the pages for their products. You can put it in a text box so it is not obliviously seen as well.

I always generally try to put another tab as well. It is kind of a pain, but I try to type about 5 -10 different things up like "Our Return Policy" or "Why buy from us" or "Our price guarantee" Something like those and have the page choose one randomly at the render time. That way the content is always changing as well. Similar to this, http://screencast.com/t/schHrJjk It is just content to water down the feed content and make it possibly rank.

[Sundance_Kidd]

ok.  any chance you can extend a dummies guide for that lol? i kinda follow for the most part. thanks, very very helpful L.

C

[Sundance_Kidd]

thank you!

C

[LesleyPaone]

There is another way too. One thing I have used to rank sites with content issues like this is to create a couple of tabs on the product pages and programatically fill them out. Say an "About {$manufacturer_name}" and a "Our Return Policy".

What you are trying to do is water down the content that is creating the duplicate. This will often work and bring the pages back into the index and ranking again.

[Everett]

Christian,

Here are your choices:

1. Rewrite the content so it is unique to your site.

OR, if that is not scalable because you have so many pages then:

2. Noindex most of those pages and allow indexation of only the ones that you have time/budget to rewrite.

Yes duplicate content is pretty rampant in eCommerce, which is precisely why Google has to handle it by choosing a canonical version and not ranking most of the others. They're not going to "ban" or "penalize" you, but ultimately the result is the same: No rankings = No Traffic.

[Sundance_Kidd]

well it looks like dupe content is a big issue which i am sure is pretty common in the e-commerce environment.  I'm a bit fresh in the seo e-commerce as my background is more with services.  I assume a stop over at Google Webmaster forum will provide some insight? thanks Lesley.

Christian

[Everett]

It could be due to any of those reasons, including others like content quality. Do you have unique product descriptions for all 300k+ pages?

[LesleyPaone]

I have seen it happen several times. Are you using a feed for your product description data? It could be an issue where a competitor has started to out rank you with the same description data and you have been dropped from the index.