Curious, anyone ever had over half of their indexed links drop on an e-commerce site?
-
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
-
awesome and thanks! I love nashville. went to school there:)
-
By phone it is 615-678-5464, by email it is lesley@dh42.com
-
what's the best way to reach you L?
thx,
C
-
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.
-
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
-
thank you!
C
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
It could be due to any of those reasons, including others like content quality. Do you have unique product descriptions for all 300k+ pages?
-
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.
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
-
50% Drop in ALL Traffic Post June Update
We've had 50% drop in Google and Direct traffic post June Google update. Why would direct suddenly plummet as well? Could it be something with Google tag manager or our new cookie policy and cookie management system? Any help would be greatly appreciated as I am a disabled person and trying to figure out what is going on with our site
Reporting & Analytics | | inhouseninja0 -
Since implementing GDPR, has anyone seen website traffic plummet?
On December 1 and 2, I implemented a cookie banner on 5 of my Wix sites (https://www.sanitationsolutionsinc.com is one example) in order to be in compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and LGPD. Since then my traffic according to Wix Analytics and Google Analytics has plummeted. Anyone else have the same issue? How did you fix it?
Reporting & Analytics | | Jason_Taylor0 -
Tracking Mailto Links Through Event Tracking
Hi I am trying to get event tracking working on some mailto links on a website using Universal Analytics. I've read various resources as nothing seems to mention mailto links. Does it not work on tracking outbound clicks on emails? Thanks in advance.
Reporting & Analytics | | Karen_Dauncey0 -
Traffic drops considerable at midnight
Hi can any one tell me why traffic drops at the same time each day, at around midnight until 8.30 am website traffic drops off. We target the UK and the USA, we have geo target set for the UK in webmaster. Thanks for your help
Reporting & Analytics | | Taiger0 -
What will you do when seeing the rank and traffic are dropping?
No black-hat SEO strategy was adopted, so we suppose it's not a penalty, but ranks and organic traffics are dropping. What will you do in this situation? And how long it takes for you to make sure it's not a normal flux, but something wrong happens on your site? Thanks in advance
Reporting & Analytics | | JonnyGreenwood0 -
Drop in google referral traffic
Hi guys, As we know, GA shows google as traffic source in two ways: google / organic for organic searches and google.TLD / referral for everything else: google groups, base.google.com, static pages, google reader, google image search, google search appliance/mini. What we noticed is that around Oct 20th there's a huge drop of google.TLD / referral traffic to our site. Do you experience something similar? I couldn't find anything Google-related that happened around this specific date. We use GSA for our site search and I'm wondering if this could be the reason - maybe someone from our development team made changes to GSA settings that affected this traffic source. Looking forward to hearing from you! Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | lgrozeva0 -
Traffic dropped 75% - Panda 2 Penalized?
Hello everyone, My e-commerce website traffic dropped by 75% overnight, on April 12th. The website has been around since 2003 and growing every year. Over the years gained some great placement for some competitive keywords and stayed on page 1 for some time. After the Panda update, some of our major keywords dropped from page 1 to page 10. The first Panda update had a slightly negative effect on us, by bumping up all the brand's websites (brands we carry) placing the brands in the first couple positions (giving them 2-3 first spots) pushing us down. However, the Panda 2 killed us. I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on my situation. Did anyone ever have luck or would recommend contacting Google, and asking them for advise or reasons why the site was dropped. The website in question is www.instyleswimwear.com Thanks in advance,
Reporting & Analytics | | AlexGop
Alex0 -
Custom GA tracking and link value
Hi I'm working on a real estate agents web site which has a lots of links coming from paid listings in real estate linstings sites (this in France so I'm not sure examples will mean anything but basically the agents have 900 house listings in each site and each listing has a backlink) In analytics these are classified as referals and that's fine for the moment But because sites provide different types of links, we are considering tagging all paid links with analytics utm codes. Mainly to learn which ads are actually providing qualified traffic (providing contacts). I'm guessing that currently these links, there are thousands, bring seo value to my client's web site and are not considered as paid links. Will adding the analytics codes to these links cause a loss of their value by clearly indicating to Google that we paid for them? What's the current thinking on this? I'm tempted not to be worried about being honest about the origin of these links but I'm worried that there is a real danger of loosing current ranking Any arguments FOR tagging paid links ? Thanks for you help Neil
Reporting & Analytics | | NeilInFrance0