I have found pages with 1000 plus words and various pics references and a video or animation rank very well. I'm sure if you hit 5000 words it may get a bit out of hand but in my experience more is better within reason. It's the video or animation that I find really makes the difference. I still count 300-400 as a bare minimum.

im in the equestrian industry and there is a number of thriving fourums out there however like all forums the quality of info is dubious and as yet the Q&A style of community has not yet been made. I feel this is an opertunity I could work with.

I realise that its a long game and will take lots of work. My main worry is that we are a retailer and that people may not trust our Q&A as we are retailers and no matter how much we separate our sales hat from our community element I feel it may not work. The fact that it has not been done make me think it is worth a try.

Any examples of an ecommerce site with a thriving community attached that would be a good model to emulate?

I think its important to have multiple pages about the selected keywords. Not pages that are the same but to use the kiln dried logs example I would make pages like below.

Why hey our kiln dried logs work so well in wood burning stoves.

Hardwood kiln dried logs

softwood kiln dried logs

how we make our kiln dried logs

sustainabley sourced logs

why are kiln dried logs better

I would link all these to your page that actually sells the logs and if you make sure that each article is specific to its title and they are all different yet relevant then they should help you keep on topic without dilution.

If I create a good community in my particular field on my SEO site and have a quality Q&A section like this etc (ripping of MOZ's idea here sorry, I hope it's ok) will the long term returns be worth the effort of creating and man ageing this. Is the user created content of as much use as I think it will be?

It seems to me that for most ecommerce sites (myself included) that canonical is not the answer. If you have to many near identical products on your site it may be better to re evaluate what you have stocking and if you must stock them then the way forward is to make one page that properly explains them and allows purchase rather than many.

The only uses I can see for canonical is to consolidate old blogs and articles on similar topics. Using it to tidy an ecommerce site seems to be a misuse of the tool.

Thanks

Have you used this approach? If so how effective is it?

I have all the usual colour size attributes on my products. I just used that as a simple example. Its more to do with similar non branded products that are different enough to be "products" but not when I have 15 similar it's impossible to write fully different descriptions. Screwdrivers, screws or paint would have been a better example. There are hundreds of ranges like that. If you had five unimportant brands of screwdriver and you had flat head and philips head. Each one is marginally different (handle style etc) but there is no keyword benefit to having each optimised for say "flat head screwdriver". Having a good range is beneficial to the customer but seems to be detrimental to SEO. Is it better to employ writers to make every description different no matter how complex or should I canonical it?

I'm thinking of using rel=canonical for similar products on my site.

Say I'm selling pens and they are al very similar. I.e. a big pen in blue, a pack of 5 blue bic pens, a pack of 10, 50, 100 etc. should I rel=canonical them all to the best seller as its almost impossible to make the pages unique. (I realise the best I realise these should be attributes and not products but I'm sure you get my point)

It seems sensible to have one master canonical page for bic pens on a site that has a great description video content and good images plus linked articles etc rather than loads of duplicate looking pages.

love to hear thoughts from the Moz community.

The industry i work in is a bit old fashioned and i find it hard to get links from quality well ranked and relevant sites as there is not many around. For a Small business with a growing site £500 per link is just insane!

I understand the value of quality links but finding a relevant site above PR3 (I realize PR is not the be all and end all these days) is very uncommon in our industry. Our competitors have massively more links than us but in my opinion there links are a tad spammy. If my link profile looked like my biggest competitors i would be disavowing them asap.

I feel a quality link is,

• From a site that relevant to the topic of your site/page.
• From a high ranking site.
• In a prominent position as near the top of the page as possible.
• Surrounded by quality content about the page you are linking to.
• Preferably as close to the index page as possible, not 8 clicks down.
• The anchor text should vary from your other existing links.
• The page should not have a high number of external links on it.
• the page title should be relevant to your page and not be a links, forum or directory page.
• Preferably not on the same C block as other links to your site.
• The link should be likely to drive direct traffic as well as produce an SEO gain.

I'm sure i missed some things as I'm a site owner not an SEO specialist.

I was not judging "Good link builders" more the companies who claim to get you to the top of google in a month guys. Unfortunately I'm yet to find a good link builder. I keep finding the conmen and black hat guys. I think the good guys must cost too much for most small to medium businesses. As a retailer with an ecommerce site the current google methods seem to be geared to kick small businesses to the kerb. Ebay and amazon and now google shopping are wiping out businesses that are already hurting due to the economy.

I agree with goggles lust for quality sites i just feel it is sending big multinational sites so far ahead that it is almost impossible to get any momentum if you are a smaller business.

The thing i don't understand is why google seems to want so much content on ecommerce sites. Surely if real world shops are anything to go by shop layout, cleanliness, good displays, stock volume, price and service are what matter not how many leaflets and books you have on the products. in googles eyes you don't need to have the product and you can be double the price so long as you have a lot of info on the product none of that matters  it just seems odd to me as a retailer that they don't differentiate sites by type so each can be optimized for the particular purpose.

That being said its just the way of the world.

Rant over!

I think its important to have multiple pages about the selected keywords. Not pages that are the same but to use the kiln dried logs example I would make pages like below.

Why hey our kiln dried logs work so well in wood burning stoves.

Hardwood kiln dried logs

softwood kiln dried logs

how we make our kiln dried logs

sustainabley sourced logs

why are kiln dried logs better

I would link all these to your page that actually sells the logs and if you make sure that each article is specific to its title and they are all different yet relevant then they should help you keep on topic without dilution.

I have found pages with 1000 plus words and various pics references and a video or animation rank very well. I'm sure if you hit 5000 words it may get a bit out of hand but in my experience more is better within reason. It's the video or animation that I find really makes the difference. I still count 300-400 as a bare minimum.