Google Freshness Update & Ecommerce Site Strategies

[iAnalyst.com]

Just curious what other ecommerce SEO's are doing to battle fresh content. We've been having our clients work on internal blogs, adding articles one click away from landing pages, and implement product reviews when possible but I don't know that it's enough.

Our bigger customers have landing pages (usually category pages) with very competitive keywords. So my main issue is what to do with fresh content on category pages..

I've toyed with the idea of having the landing page content re written every now and then. We used to use a blog parser to bring snippits of comments from the blog into landing pages but I believe that to be a problem with duplicate content. News snippits from other sites don't seem beneficial either.

Anyone have any other ideas?

[FranckNlemba]

I approve all these...you should consider freshness as specific to certain kws (generic ones for example)....I already use tips sha has suggested above: check serps manually and decide wether or not a given kw/landing page need fresh content

[ShaMenz]

Hi searchpl,

If you are worried about "freshness" for ecommerce sites, there is one very important thing to do - eliminate wasted effort.

The fact is that what I call the "freshness effect" does not apply to every keyword term. Google appears to be determining whether fresh information is, or is not more relevant according to the individual term. If you manually check SERPs you will see this easily.

So, eliminating wasted effort while working toward providing new and relevant content all comes back to good old fashioned research. The smart approach is to spend some time manually checking SERPs for your "money" keywords. If you see evidence of the "freshness effect" for particular terms, those are the ones you could consider focusing new content development efforts on.

The keyword terms that might be affected will entirely depend upon the types of products in your stores - for example, I know that "weight loss" is a term where the "freshness effect" seems evident in SERPs.

Of course, if you decide to develop new content you should follow the advice already given by EGOL and James on quality and method. Incidentally, I would say the smart thing to do in this situation would be to come up with the type of content that is easy to add on a continuous basis - things like ongoing series, videos, podcasts, and cleverly managed user generated content.

Incidentally, if you listen carefully to information coming out of Bing via Duane Forrester, you may notice that Google is not the only Search engine that takes notice of freshness

Hope that helps,

Sha

Also: Don't stress too much if you are using automated feeds to update your product offerings on a daily basis ... you may already be providing fresh content if products are frequently added. The challenge then is to ensure that quality is up to scratch

[JamesNorquay]

Well things you can do:

• Blog on sub folder with fresh content each week.

• you can have category level pages you update, say your top 30 categorys for example then you update these specific pages with fresh content.

I know eCommerce sites are not easy to work with as clients in some cases do not want content on specific pages you just need to keep adding fresh content and product pages where possible.

[EGOL]

I am doing what I described above.  I believe that it is far more valuable to build a library of awesome resources for my potential customers than it is.... as you worded it... "having the landing page content re written every now and then."

Writing is a time consuming job.  If I am going to do it I am going to be attacking new turf with substantive evergreen content.

Once you have a great landing page don't rewrite it because you think it will impress google.  Spend your time improving your site and your visitor's experience.

[iAnalyst.com]

Yes but what about fresh content specifically on a landing/category page.

[EGOL]

For an ecommerce site I would focus my efforts on evergreen content rather than fresh content.

I would be working to make my product descriptions unique, substantive and exciting.

And, rather than  blogging trivia and prattle I would be writing unique, substantive, generously illustrated "how to do it" guides for my important products.