Panda Update and Website Content

[hfranz]

According to the Panda Update information, website content that is or was written to help with SEO is now not the best idea, but content that is very informative and interesting is the way to go. But if you have an Ecommerce Website how can you write informative bookmarking content, if each product you sell is very similar, and the information for the product is just details about the product. Its hard to write good content for an eCommerce website. We have 300+ products that are all similar, but if we would write content about each product, it would be similar and not interesting to read. People just want to purchase the product, not read a bunch of content.

How do websites that sell many products and not content driven websites rank well in search?

[ShaMenz]

Hi,

I would recommend reading the recent blog post from Kate Morris eCommerce Syndicated Content: How to Win

I know the feeling of being faced with a couple of thousand product descriptions with this problem (and unfortunately it gives me no joy to think "I told you so"), but all you can really do is take it one product at a time 

[Sam_McRoberts]

I've seen this time and again. You may not like the answer, but there is simply no substitute for writing unique, compelling content. Even if you think readers won't read it, search engines will, and sometimes you have to play to both people and engines. But, if writing unique creative descriptions (like Woot) is out of the question, there are a few other things you can do to increase your visibility on Google.

For one, you might consider submitting your product feed to Google: http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?answer=171375

You might also consider marking up your product pages with micro-formatting, a la Schema.org

You should also make sure that all of your product images have very descriptive image names and ALT tags so that you can maximize traffic from Google Image search.

If you find that you're too close to the product to write something creative for 300 similar items, you could always try using TextBroker or a similar service to pay different writers to write short, unique descriptions for you.

Hope that helps!

[eTundra]

Don't overthink your on-page, product-specific content.  You're not going to get whacked by Panda just because you have a lot of content about a lot of similar products.  Just make sure each product description is informative, well-written, maybe a little humorous, and above all original.

Sites that were hit hard by Panda were using mass-generated low-quality content targeted towards trending keywords in order to make money via AdWords and affiliates.  Some kind-of-similar-but-original product descriptions were not part of the problem and were not targeted by Panda.

To your main question, you can always write interesting content, no matter how boring the subject.

Take a step back from your products for a second and brainstorm some broader categories that are loosely associated with your niche.  Next, brainstorm some catchy, interesting article titles that still reference your products but are about those bigger categories with more mass appeal.

For instance, I write content for a restaurant equipment parts company.  Not the most exciting topic on the planet, but I've had success by tracking trends in the restaurant industry like Groupon and mislabeled seafood and then written an interesting article about those topics.  I figure out a way to work my company into the article and then put it out there to gain links back to my site.

The good news is since it's such a niche market there's not a lot of competition for the keywords I want to rank for and it only takes a few quality links from an article to get rankings up.

Combine some quality on-page content (without worrying too much about duplication - as long as a decently paid human writes each description you'll be fine) with some compelling articles about topics loosely associated with your products and you should see some improvement in your organic performance.