Too many articles within ecommerce site?
-
So recently purchased an ecommerce site to work on with lots of potential. The site was effected by Penguin update and now I am trying to fix up some issues.
One of the problems I think may be the articles that he had written within the site. The site is an ecommerce site but has lots of articles like how to's and tips.
A lot of these articles are not very fluent but seems to be written for SEO. Should I just remove them entirely or should I just stuff them in the back somewhere.
-
Willny
In general there is no such thing as too much content. But you mentioned that some of the articles seem not fluent.. that could be another way of saying they are spammy. If this is the case simply go through the articles and make them sound natural.
Subdomain vs directories. In most all cases you want to go with directories or pages, as sub-domains can be viewed as separate websites completely.
If the site was hit by Penguin / Panda then the previous owner probably did some un-natural stuff to try and rank. This may explain why his articles seem spammy it may also indicate a bigger problem like buying links / exchanging links / and blantant spamming on forums / blogs / social media. Make sure you look at the backlink structure of the site before you go killing pages.
Hope that helps
-
I am writing articles that focus on the use of individual products. They are about 500 to 1500 words and usually have 3 to 8 photos. Some have a video. I started working on them in November and now some of those articles rank in the top three positions of google for the product and my product page ranks immediately below or above them.
When a visitor lands on one of the article pages there are links in the article to the sales page and also some "house ads" on the article page for related products.
Some of the videos are now ranking in the top three positions of youtube search for the product or a related query. Some of these also appear in the google search results.
I don't do linkbuilding but these articles have gotten some natural links from dremel and other how-to-do-it sites.
These articles are all on dreamweaver pages or in a /blog/ folder (wordpress). I use "buy buttons" on dreamweaver pages rather than an ecommerce platform.
-
Are you using the articles as a subdomain/subfolder? Or within the ecommerce platform?
For me, each category has their own dedicated description 200-300 words.
-
Articles on an ecommerce site can be a great thing. I have been spending most of my time recently blogging and writing articles for ecommerce.
Those articles can pull traffic, they speak to the expertise of your staff, they show that you care about customers using your products properly, they help customers select your products and if they are superbly written and extremely informative then can help you get links that improve your rankings.
But, if those article suck then they could be damaging to your business.
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
-
Should my client copy and paste his blog posts onto other professional sites?
I have a client who is an Attorney and participates in a couple of different Q and A legal sites. One of these legal sites is recommending to my client that he copy and paste his blog posts onto his profile page on the Q and A site. I understand my client wanting to copy and paste his blog posts onto these sites, as it will not only get his content in front of a larger audience, but also lend credibility. However, I've always heard that that could cause some duplicate content problems. Will my client's blog likely get penalized by google for copying and pasting his blog posts onto other relevant sites?
Content Development | | ScottMcPherson0 -
Filling Up Content For A New News Publishing Site
Hello, SEO Gurus. I have a client whom I've been working with for a few months now, and part of our service offering is to publish and promote fresh, daily content on his site's blog. This strategy has been a huge success thus far, he is very happy with the content, etc. Now, he is getting ready to launch a second site, which will be a news publishing site for his industry niche, and we will once again be providing the content on a daily basis: we're going to be producing 10 to 15 articles a day. It's a big operation for us. The client, however, is concerned that he doesn't want the site to appear "thin" on content in the early going, and asked if it would be possible to populate the new site with the articles we wrote on the other site's blog. My gut reaction to this is that it would be an exceedingly bad idea to do this. While we are the ones who authored the original content (and we've used author tags and publishing markup), the best bet is to simply start fresh. Besides that, seeing as we'll be pumping out tons of content on a daily basis, it won't take long to fill up the content coffers. That being said, I just wanted to run this past you all and see if anyone had any alternative ideas on how to use the old content without it being duplicate content. I was thinking that maybe designating all of the old articles with noindex, nofollow could be an option? Many thanks in advance for your time and attention. Sincerely, Mike
Content Development | | RCNOnlineMarketing0 -
What is the best way to get around duplicate content when you are advertising exactly the same content on two different sites?
I am currently trying to improve exposure for an online degrees website but the content for the degree program pages is exactly the same as the company's main website. What would you suggest for getting around the duplicate content issue as a lot of the curriculum content will obviously be the same for each module, etc? Thanks
Content Development | | BeattieGroup0 -
Mobile Sites / Useragent detection
I've got a question about how search engines declare that they're mobile browsers... Our website is based on wordpress, and uses the caching plugin W3TC to send a different site template to mobile useragents - i believe from the HTTP useragent string; (the same content is served on every page whether it's a desktop or mobile - just different themes). After having this mobile site online for a few months, we're a little confused as to why google still shows the instant preview of the desktop version for mobile users, and it doesn't show the little mobile phone icon in our SERPs for mobile devices (it's as if it doesn't realise the mobile site exists). I was reading today that the "old" method of serving different content based on the browser is to use the HTTP useragent string; and there's a "new" object checking method which is more robust (although I can't find a lot of information about it). Can anyone explain the "new" method? Would this be the reason that google is so far ignorant of our mobile site?
Content Development | | AlecPR0 -
A site review please
Hi, first post here so hope i have posted this in the right place. From reading the forums a number of people have asked for site reviews and received some very good feedback so I thought I would jump aboard too. One of my companies, Digital Cow, is based around the world of affiliate marketing and had been doing very well until recent Google changes killed the whole process of making sites based around other people's datafeeds. Through considerable testing we have countered this by increasing the blend of duplicate content and unique, niche related, content. As a result a website we launched about 2 months ago is currently getting around 350 unique hits a day but seems to have stagnated. We know the potential is there for thousands of daily hits on this site and well over 20,000 hits a day on all our websites, but we are having issues with Google at the moment. One week we could be position 10 for a keyword, next position 90, then back to position 10 again and so on. In the last week some 95 keywords moved up the ranking and 62 moved down - we are seoing for a couple of hundred keywords. A small sample of some of these words and our ranking for them are listed below bodysuits women 13
Content Development | | Grumpy_Carl
tumbum 14
bright leggings 18
bright tights 18
bridal hold ups 19
opaque hold ups 20
girls in leggings 21
pretty polly hold up 21
fish net hold ups 22
slimming tights 22
tum bum 26
magic knickers 27
toeless tights 28 and there are many more. The website in question is www.brighttights.com. If anyone could spare a moment to offer their opinion on what they think of the site re seo that would be most welcome. Given it's an ecommerce site there are limits to the content we can add on the homepage. Many thanks Carl0 -
Forum Site: Content Value Post Panda
I run a forum website built on Wordpress. We're about two years old. The theme of the site is a directory of attorneys, with each directory listing having its own blog account on our site. Through this platform, we receive 75-80 blog posts now every month of varying quality from our users. QUESTION: A good number of the blogs published on our site are also published on the attorney's law firm site as well (they're syndicating on our site). Will this hurt our site in light of Panda? A lot of the syndicated content is very well written and insightful. By contrast, Will non-syndicated but average to below average posts hurt our site? The authors almost always link back to their firm site. Would love some feedback on whether we should be happy about the syndicated content or whether we should potentially ban it?
Content Development | | JSOC0 -
Optimising my ecommerce blog
Hey guys, I am after suggestions on how i can better optimise my blog? www.imrubbish.co.uk/blog I have been getting regular blog posts up until say a month ago. Looking to get a new writer and get 3-4 blog posts a week done. Sometimes targeting products, sometimes general chat about bins. I am hoping you kind people can make a couple of suggestions i could be doing. Thank you
Content Development | | imrubbish0 -
Word Press site traffic plumit
Hi, I have a client who has a word press site that we put together for him. We have noticed that over approximately the last 2 months his sites traffic has plumitied - its gone from a health 200+ per day and sharply decresaed and is not practically zero. Has anyone got any ideas of why this might be? Here is the link to the site - http://wheelworldreviews.co.uk/ Thanks
Content Development | | Tinderbox0