Mass Referencing Supplier Product Info & SEO
-
Hi
I have a mass referencing project which will mean taking between 1000-2000 SKUs from a supplier, taking all their content & loading it onto our site.
I need to make a case for not doing this from an SEO perspective. As these are pages I want to rank.
I'm going to push for optimising titles/meta titles before they're loaded in.
However if not, I may be forced to load in the products as they are & go back to optimise everything - does anyone see a real issue with this?
I know there are so many 'similar' descriptions of products on ecommerce sites & across the web, so how does Google deal with these? The pages won't be identical as the templates are different, but maybe 100-200 words of descriptions could be until we work through them.
Although this isn't ideal - what are the implications?
The problem for me is, the managers just want the products on the site, without much thought regarding organic traffic/categorisation initially.
Thanks!
-
Becky,
I think Sean has given you some great advice. I'd just like to add a few things.
I have seen rankings drop when sites add a bunch (thousands) of products with manufacturer descriptions and allow them to be indexed. I have seen rankings rise when these are either removed from the index, or improved with unique copy.
However, you have the manufacturer description so why not leverage it? One idea I have proposed to a few clients is to use that as the description provided to channel partners, affiliates and sites like Amazon, eBay and Google Shopping. Let them deal with the duplicate content while you keep yours unique. Otherwise you'll write all of that unique copy and within months they'll all have it on their sites (because you gave it to them in feeds) and that hard work and money will have been for nothing.
-
Great thank you!
-
Hi Becky,
Authority-wise, they were product pages that were deep down in the IA of the site so they had very little PA anyway. And rankings-wise, they were very niche, branded products so we didn't have a great deal of competition anyway - rankings were always pretty good.
Even if you're selling something unbranded and generic, I would say that you should create the pages ASAP to start the ball rolling. You're not going to get penalized in the first instance of loading them on and when you come back later to optimise them, you should gain rankings.
Cheers,
Sean
-
Hi Sean
This is helpful thanks.
Did you see any drop in authority/rankings when loading them in unoptimised to start with?
Thanks!
-
Hey,
I used to work for a company that had me loading on around 10,000 product SKUs into the system at one time. Rather than lifting the supplier descriptions of each item, we used excel to template up the descriptions of the products based on the stock information we had - ranges, sizes, materials etc. Page titles, however, we left auto generated by our CMS until we had a chance to go back and review them.
I would get them loaded on the site in bulk to get them indexed/available for product PPC bidding with the intention of coming back to them later to optimise - meta descriptions, page titles, product descriptions etc.
In the end I think we used a crowdsourcing platform like Elance to hire several freelancers to write the product descriptions uniquely. It was a great investment from an SEO and written copy perspective. Might be something to think about?
Cheers,
Sean
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
-
Fetch & Render
Hi I've done Google fetch & render of this page & I have images which Google/customers aren't seeing - how do I identify the problems with this page? http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Which is the best SEO plugin for joomla
Hey there, can any one please tell me the Best plugin i can choose For joomla?? I am going use sh404ref & 2nd one i am thinking is EFSEO. If besides This do u know any Good One, Please Help to choose Best Thanx in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | poojaverify060 -
Global SEO
Hey there Mozzers! I have a question about global SEO. I have a website that has multiple tlds (.com.au .co.uk .com etc ) Each of these are redirecting depending the user location. Where should my link building be focused on? What are some Global SEO Techniques you suggest ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AngelosS0 -
WhoIs, SEO & Privacy
Is WHOIS data used by Google as a ranking signal? We had a website that had some bad SEO work done a while ago hence took a knock, If I use the same WHOIS data on a new site is that likely to cause an issue? Also I don't like the idea of providing too much information for privacy reasons, so have tended to stick to general email addresses and department names rather than actual personal information. Is that a bad approach?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
International SEO
We want to expand to a few new regions internationally. My question is if we register sites in different geographies and upload our exact site to these web addresses (exact duplicates) so our web addresses will then be www.mysite.co.uk (current site) www.mysite.com (new intended site) www.mysite.com.au (new intended site) and add rel=“canonical” linking elements to prevent duplicate content issues.Will our content production on our current site www.mysite.co.uk retain its value within all the other sites. Is this the best way to do it? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aquaspressovending0 -
Seo flash site
Hey. Would hear whether it is possible to SEO a website which is flash site cms?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Agger0 -
# element above Menu - Is there any SEO Value to it
Is there any Value to having the H1 element above the MENU in a Typical Application ? My intention is to tell the "Bot" that the H1 element is more important than the Menu Items . Are there any examples of such sites . The closest that I have seen is (NOT MY SITES) http://www.airfarewatchdog.com/ and http://www.airfarewatchdog.com/cheap-flights/from-dallas-texas/1531/?airport_code=dfw&depsub=1&c2calert=0&deal_alert=0&from_hp=true Here they (second link) they have H1 above the Bread Crumb ( they dont have any menu though).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chaits0 -
Page Titles SEO Title
Hi, I run an e-commerce store and within the CMS I define the SEO title, SEO description and SEO keywords for each item. I spoke to a SEO firm who advised me to start every product title with the colour, as this will reduce the duplicate page titles and serve me well in the future. Whats everyones view on this? Does naming something Grey Armani Jeans | Armani Jeans from Designer Boutique stand up better against Armani Jeans Grey | Armani Jeans from Designer Boutique? Any help or tips on how to format the page titles and descriptions would be great. Thanks Will
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WillBlackburn0