Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How often should I update category and product content to keep it fresh?
-
I want to keep our site up to date and fresh with content. How often should I update categories and products pages with content? What angel should I take with categories (new products/services etc.)
Thanks Craig
-
My pleasure, thanks Craig, currently on the Isle Of Wight is lovely !
-
Hi Dan,
Thanks for your input, invaluable!
Well its going to be a warm weekend on the coast so enjoy the lovely sunshine and birthday!
Regards
Craig
-
In that case i would be looking to closer associate the reviews to the page content.
I would also concentrate on using the blog etc to generate fresh content and deep link (where directly appropriate and helpful for user) from the blog post to the product pages and of course category pages too (re your response and factoring in Chris' good comments too). Regular fresh unique content (associated/tied to an author & publisher) of a high quality (hence likely to earn social amplification) linked to the relevant categories and product pages (where appropriate & helpful) will do far more toward those pages being perceived well by G than overly concentrating on changing the content in the category & product pages
Hope this helps
ps - I'm going to Worthing for a 40th tomorrow coincidentally (just checked your profile)
-
Thanks for the answer. I'll take a closer look at this.
Regards
Craig
-
Freshness of a page isn't necessary on all counts, as a page may maintain high rankings in spite of not having been updated for years. For many, if not most website owners, freshness is not going to keep them out of the rankings.
Moving forward though, with social and authorship playing a larger role in rankings, more of your competitors will be finding that effective use of those channels will help lift the authority of their domain, giving them a ranking advantage over you if you're not networking and publishing as well. I think for most website owners, having active social profiles attached to your domain will be worth paying more attention to than the freshness of their content.
-
Thanks Dan, a good answer.
We already have products reviews, however we have had problems with integrating these so they are passing on seo value as the are provided by a 3rd party, Feefo. A bit of java script supplies the reviews at present.
What's your thought on categories? As I suggested or otherwise?
Appreciate your input.
Craig
-
The problem with Products is that they are are hard to update the content for since they usually (but not always) have an 'evergreen' description. Hence a great way to keep the content fresh is to enable customer reviews and comments on the product page and then encourage customers (via your 'post sale touch points' such as follow up emails saying thanks for your order, hows the product ?) to leave a review of the product (& incentivise them to do so via loyalty points/future discounts). This will mean the product page is continually populated with new fresh content that is also user generated demonstrating customer/user engagement hence showing 'signs of life' from real people too.
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
-
Updating Old Content at Scale - Any Danger from a Google Penalty/Spam Perspective?
We've read a lot about the power of updating old content (making it more relevant for today, finding other ways to add value to it) and republishing (Here I mean changing the publish date from the original publish date to today's date - not publishing on other sites). I'm wondering if there is any danger of doing this at scale (designating a few months out of the year where we don't publish brand-new content but instead focus on taking our old blog posts, updating them, and changing the publish date - ~15 posts/month). We have a huge archive of old posts we believe we can add value to and publish anew to benefit our community/organic traffic visitors. It seems like we could add a lot of value to readers by doing this, but I'm a little worried this might somehow be seen by Google as manipulative/spammy/something that could otherwise get us in trouble. Does anyone have experience doing this or have thoughts on whether this might somehow be dangerous to do? Thanks Moz community!
On-Page Optimization | | paulz9990 -
Product content length & links within product description
Hello, I have questions regarding content length and links within descriptions. With our ecommerce site, we have thousands of products, each with a unique description. In the product description, I have links to the parent category and grandparent category (if it has one) in the main product text which is generally about 175 words. Then I have a last paragraph that's about 75 words that includes links to our main homepage and our main product catalogue page. Is the content length long enough? I used to use text that was 500 words, and shortening it I still rank when launching new products, so I don't think an increase in text length will have any additional benefit. I do see conflicting information when I do searches, with some people recommending a minimum of 300 words and some saying to try and go a 1000 for category pages. In regards to the links, I noticed a competitor has stopped following this format, so I'm unsure if I should keep going too. Is it too many links to have each of the products link back to the main catalogue and homepage? Is it good to have links with anchor text to the categories a product is in? There are breadcrumbs on the page with these links already. There are already have heaps of links on our pages (footer, and a right sidebar with image links to relevant categories), so my pages do get flagged for too many links. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | JustinBSLW0 -
Does hover over content index well
i notice increasing cases of portfolio style boxes on site designs (especially wordpress templates) where you have an image and text appears after hover over (sorry for my basic terminology). does this text which appears after hover over have much search engine value or as it doesnt immediately appear on pageload does it carry slightly less weight like tabbed content? any advice appreciated thanks neil
On-Page Optimization | | neilhenderson0 -
How many product subcategories are ok?
Let's say I have a sea glass ankle bracelet. On my site, my main keyword is "Sea Glass Jewelry" and have ranked relatively well for this, but this main page has over 200 products in it. I thought that if the URL has the keywords in it, it would be beneficial. I also have a section for all my bracelets, so it would be there and then, a more specific ankle bracelets category. So, technically, an ankle bracelet will show up 3x. Sea Glass Jewelry (all products go here) Bracelets (all bracelets go here) Ankle Bracelets (only ankle bracelets) The URL is only attached to the main category so to speak. If you click the ankle bracelets category, the url will still revert back to the original main category: seaglassjewelry/sterlinganklebracelet so I don't believe there is duplicate content. I have had my domain for years and it has ranked well until someone hacked into my site 2 years back. I have never been able to recover from this loss. Since then, I have tried to optimize my site, but nothing seems to be working and I just want to make sure that I am not hurting my ranking by doing this. Can someone confirm this is the best way to do it or make a suggestion? Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | tiffany11030 -
Duplicate content penalty
when moz crawls my site they say I have 2x the pages that I really have & they say I am being penalized for duplicate content. I know years ago I had my old domain resolve over to my new domain. Its the only thing that makes sense as to the duplicate content but would search engines really penalize me for that? It is technically only on 1 site. My business took a significant sales hit starting early July 2013, I know google did and algorithm update that did have SEO aspects. I need to resolve the problem so I can stay in business
On-Page Optimization | | cheaptubes0 -
Pagination for product page reviews
Hi, I am looking to add pagination on product pages (they have lots of reviews on the page). I am considering using rel="next/prev, to connect the series of review pages to the main product page. I unfortunately don't have a view-all page for these reviews or the option to get one - the reviews refresh on the same product page (by clicking whatever number page of reviews). This means each page has the exact same description content and everything else, but with different reviews. In this case is rel=next a good option? The format currently would be: On example.com/product link rel="next" href="http://example.com/product?review-p2" On example.com/product?review-p2 link rel="prev" href="http://example.com/product, link rel="next" href="http://example.com/product?review-p3 etc. Would this be a good format for product page reviews? I see rel=nextprev commonly used on ecommerce category/list pages but not really on the paginated reviews on product pages, so I thought I would see if anyone has advice on how best to solve this. I'm also wondering if it would be best to not combine this with a canonical tag on all the different review pages pointing to the product page, seeing as the reviews are actually different (despite the rest of the content being identical). I am hoping to pick up longer tail traffic from this, I figure by connecting the pages and not using canonicals that this way I could get more traffic from the phrases used in the reviews. By leaving out the canonicals, is it possible a user searching for phrases that might be deeper in the series, to land on, say, ?review-p4? Any thoughts if this would drive more traffic? Thanks!.
On-Page Optimization | | pikka0 -
Title tag for category page
I'd like to know your views on the best approach for title tags for category pages for ecommerce sites. 3 examples A) Category name | Free delivery on $50 purchase | Brand name B) Discover best "category name" on brand name C) Category Name | 1st Keyword, 2nd keyword | Brand name Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | walidalsaqqaf0 -
Percentage of duplicate content allowable
Can you have ANY duplicate content on a page or will the page get penalized by Google? For example if you used a paragraph of Wikipedia content for a definition/description of a medical term, but wrapped it in unique content is that OK or will that land you in the Google / Panda doghouse? If some level of duplicate content is allowable, is there a general rule of thumb ratio unique-to-duplicate content? thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | sportstvjobs0