Conveying Farmer Update To Client
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I work with a site that saw their super competitive top terms drop off page one with the Farmer update. So, #4 to #12.... that kinda thing.
In the last year they've added a huge catalog of 500,000 item pages. The catalog has climbed to a 76% bounce rate, where as the handful of top pages is in the 20s +/-.
To date, I haven't had much of anything to do with the catalog.
That makes for a sitewide average bounce rate of almost 70% which has almost doubled in the past year as the catalog has ramped up. The catalog gets a ton of search traffic and sells a lot of items via that organic traffic.
I'm advocating for a variety of measures, including cleaning up the catalog:
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301ing out of stock pages to the homepage
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301ing 100% bounce rate pages who've had hundreds/thousands of visits over time..
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Improving the user experience.
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Offering rainchecks for out of stock items.
They generally don't believe that the huge bounce rate (bad user experience stats) is hurting their top terms on their top pages. They see it as two different issues.
Any thoughts on how to present evidence that the catalog is the culprit? In researching it, I found these two quotes:
"In particular, it's important to note that low quality pages on one part of a site can impact the overall ranking of that site," the Google spokesman said.
and...
"Google spokesman told PCMag that sites that believe they have been adversely impacted should "extensively evaluate their site quality."
Not only that, but the item descriptions are straight from the manufacturer, so the pages aren't that unique text-wise.
Any industry standard on catalog page bounce rates?
Not that it's the only possible area of SEO improvement, because it's not. I thought those quotes were pretty conclusive, but I guess not. Is there some straight-from-Google additional info to suport this? Or, am I just wrong to focus on user experience... bounce rate, pages, time on site, etc?
Thanks!
- Mike
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You think the catalog duplicate content hurt the top terms on different pages?
I can't see how I would replace the manufacturer's description on a half million items/pages. Do you?
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The Panda update had nothing to do with bounce rate and everything to do with shallow and duplicate content. If you feel your content is not shallow, low quality or copied, then your rankings dropped because you may have had a lot of links from websites there were shallow, low quality or copied. If the pages don't have unique text, then that right there could have hurt you. I would advocate putting unique, relevant, original text on all these catalog pages.
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