How does adding ecommerce to a site affect SEO? What are the negative and what are the positives?
-
We are thinking of adding ecommerce to our website as a service to our customers. We generate most of our leads through online quote requests but heard that it may be beneficial to our SEO if we add ecommerce for a few products. Is this true? Does anyone have tips on best and worst SEO ecommerce practices?
-
Thank you. This is helpful insight.
-
In general, my approach to ecommerce pages is to invest enough time and energy into them that they have no duplicate or thin content problems.
I try to create a generous description with facts and statistics about the item being sold. When I can't do that I might have multiple related items for sale on the same page.
I do have some retail pages that have been on my site for a long time. For those, I am working to improve them so there is very little risk of Panda problems. On a site where I did have some Panda problems, I have noindexed the problem pages until I have them improved for indexing again. I don't want to abandon these pages because I have a big investment in photography, writing, and inventory.
About 301 redirecting retail pages, yes, I do that, but I don't feel that they are really SEO assets to the site beyond being a page relevant for specific keywords. In combination with that I view each retail page as dead weight on the site that must be lifted with popular pages in my content areas.
-
Thank you for the response. As a business, and in the back end of our site, we are already set up for all things ecommerce, but have not pressed the go button yet. SEO is one consideration among many for ecommerce decisions. We are B2B so ecommerce is different for us than B2C businesses. From what I understand, you are saying that ecommerce is a neutral for SEO?
It is all in how you manage it just like any other site? My specific concern is if it is common to have duplicate content/ thin content problems with eccommerce pages. If so, would 301 redirects boost the authority of the page they go to or be a detractor?
-
**....but heard that it may be beneficial to our SEO if we add ecommerce for a few products. Is this true? **
If you start selling a few products you are going to need inventory, shopping cart, credit card processing, PCI certification, secure server, phone support, shipping containers, I could go on for a while longer...
If you want to start selling a few products because you want to get into retail then that is the right reason but if you are going this because somebody says it is good for your SEO, it might not work how they expected.
I have content websites with small stores and small retail websites with content libraries. I can tell you that the content and not the retail drives the rankings and traffic.
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
-
Does blogger.com stink for SEO purposes?
Three different SEO guys suggest moving my blog to another platform. " I think migrating to a more robust CMS platform like Drupal or Wordpress would be a wise decision." But, they never say why moving would benefit SEO. My blog is on a custom domain, has lots of original content and has decent organic traffic to begin with. I think I have other SEO issues to deal with before bothering with a new platform. Does blogger stink for SEO? Why?
Web Design | | Eric_haney0 -
Do Google Fonts Slow Down Your Site?
Hi Guys,
Web Design | | jeeyer
I just did a webpage speed test on http://www.webpagetest.org to see how our site is performing.
I noticed that an exteral URL called fonts.gstatic.com has a "huge" impact on our sites loading time. See a screen here: http://monosnap.com/image/z6drzC2ELoJ48d1rM0Tmtuszl3pFpH#
An overview can be seen here: http://monosnap.com/image/9hofUpr5Ld8D7mi7zyaJmGFIGhpBsY# All our scores are green and A (finally!) but I was a bit concerned when I saw the outcome of the pagespeedtest regarding the fonts.
When I load a page on my pc I indeed notice that the text content is usally quite slow in showing up, pops up afer a few seconds. Is this a know problem and Is this something I need to fix? If so what is the best approach? Looking forward on your thoughts!
Joost1 -
I want to make changes, in my site's visual appearence
As we are getting more user to our site. We decided to improve its visual appearance. As of now our site ranked higher around 1 - 5 in google. Does the visual changes affect SEO rank and what about adding subdomains?
Web Design | | FhyzicsBCPL0 -
Is anyone here managing or doing SEO for a site using GoECart?
We are preparing to update/migrate to a new ecommerce platform. We are in the process of choosing right now. One of the things we know we want is faceted navigation, but I am well aware of the problems this presents for SEO. Are any of you amazing people here using, managing or have experience with GoECart? I am interested to know your feedback, particularly from an SEO viewpoint. Thanks in advance! Dana
Web Design | | danatanseo0 -
Optimizing a Wordpress Blog For SEO
Besides the standard Yoast for SEO plugin tweaks, I'm researching best practices when setting up a wordpress blog. In this instance, the "front end" of the site would be hardcoded static pages designed for an e-commerce site, while there would also be a /blog/ attached to the site - for blog posts, fresh content, etc.
Web Design | | GKLA0 -
Question About Site Redesign and Nav / Page Structure
Hey guys, i am currently redesigning our company's site, and have come across some things that I'm not quite sure of. We used to have individual service pages in our main navigation (design, video, marketing) before the redesign. In this new design, i had the idea of making just one "services" or "capabilities" page, where these three services would each be outlined, and each service would have a list of links to more specific landing pages. Obviously, breaking it up correctly with HTML5 using the andtags. What I'm wondering is that if i'm going to be penalized for having those three services that aren't necessarily related too closely on the same page as opposed to having the one page for each service (like we have now). Any help would be greatly appreciated, and let me know if i need to elaborate more. Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | RenderPerfect0 -
Site down for more than a month - lost rankings
Hello, We have run into a situtation where we had multiple pages setup for different keywords but didn't realize that we had a name server issue that has caused the pages to be down for the last month or so (2-3 weeks on the low side.) The rank finder was still working fine, but the offline page was never reported. We realized the situation recently and have since gotten the sites back online under the new nameservers. Most of these sites were ranking 1 and 2 spots in their keywords, and now are no where to be found in the Google Index. Should I do anything differently, or just put the sites back online and wait it out? I have seen in different places that it may only take 2 weeks to come back, but it's possible that Google has marked the sites as 'not quality' because of their downtime and it will be even harder to get them to rank again. Can anyone shed any light on this situation? Any information is appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | EQ-Richie0 -
SEO ethical practice in question
A family friend asked me to take a look at her website. www.designsbymaida.com First thing i noticed is what seemed a 301 redirect or a forward to http://funktionaldesignstudios.com/dbm-old/ So her site is hosted with what it looks like, in his site(funktonaldesigns). What does this means in terms of how google sees her site and in terms of SEO. My thought is that he is boosting his domain name. He is getting the link juice. Thanks for the insight and help.
Web Design | | QualityHosting1