Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Wow that's definitely a long post to chew on!

I appreciate the content issues and know that it is really in best interest to get them fixed ASAP, that's why we are already pushing customer reviews (sometimes with images) and on the popular products have quite a few. But obviously the descriptions have got to go.

I think the best thing to do, as Steve suggested at the bottom is to run various tests with changes and more content to see what works and then build more of the same content on the rest of our pages.

The main thing that gets me is the other pages that rank in the top 50, sometimes thin affiliate sites with even less content or value than our pages! Seems a bit fishy.

One thing I still don't get though is why this 'Write a Review' page shows up instead of the newly added (indexed) product page?

If you look at this particular example:

Search on Google UK:
W11171G2

This page shows up -removed which is probably the definition of duplicate content due to its form like nature (we don't normally let these get indexed at all but I let it slide so I could use this as an example).

Now repeating the search with -removed
W11171G2 -removed

I see first result as the proper product page as the second result behind write a review.

How does that make any sense when write a review contains no content whatsoever?

Scott

Thanks, we will try some experiments but I think there is something more severe occurring here.

While you're probably right, some of the pages we are competing with (especially on things like very specific model numbers) are absolutely terrible and yet we appear nowhere for quite a lot of them. We don't even appear for unique text even when the page is indexed.

You're right about the URLs for brands, they need to have more in them but we have some which are quite old for instance -removed, which has a healthy ranking on page 1 for Seiko Watches and we don't want to because of the risks of moving lots of URLs (obviously with 301s).

I've added a link now to the thread as I realise there's even less chance of sorting it out if I don't include one.

I think it has to be something else, I should say we have had problems with this since before panda, but maybe that has made it worse.

We used to have a page indexed for each product that was a simple form to add a new review to the product, it was essentially completely duplicate as the only thing that would change on the page was the product name.

Nevertheless, this write a review page which offered no benefit to anybody searching would show up in the SERPs ahead of this product page despite the duplicate content and there only being one link to it on our site (anchor text 'Write a review for this product').

Obviously when applying the site: modifier we still got our product page showing up as most relevant!

We run an e-commerce website that has been online since 2004. For some of our older brands we are getting good rankings for the brand category pages and also for their model numbers.

For newer brands, the category pages aren't getting rankings and neither are the products - even when we search for specific unique content on that page, Google does not return results containing our pages.

The real kicker is that the pages are clearly indexed, as searching for the page itself by URL or restricting the same search using the site: modifier the page appears straight away!

Sometimes the home page will appear on page 3 or 4 of the rankings for a keyword even though their is a much more relevant page in Google's index from our site - AND THEY KNOW IT, as once again restricting with the keywords with a site: modifier shows the obviously relevant page first and loads of other pages before say the home page or the page that shows.

This leads me to the conclusion that something on certain pages is flagging up Google's algorithms or worse, that there has been manual intervention by somebody. There are literally thousands of products that are affected.

We worry about duplicate content, but we have rich product reviews and videos all over these pages that aren't showing anywhere, they look very much singled out. Has anybody experienced a situation like this before and managed to turn it around?

Link - removed

Try a page in for instance the D&G section and you will find it easily on Google most of the time.

Try a page in the Diesel section and you probably won't, applying -removed and you will.

Thanks,

Scott

85% is a very high bounce rate.

23% is very respectable but of course will vary depending on how targeted the traffic is

Java is not the same as Javascript.. Javascript is enabled in >90% of browsers I would expect maybe >95%, normally only security concerns cause people to turn it off.

Javascript is probably the way to go as it can then be crawled by GoogleBot (aslong as all links are present in the markup when the page loads). Now, many years later, Google cannot crawl flash very well or even at all in most cases.

Stick with HTML where possible.

Java is not the same as Javascript.. Javascript is enabled in >90% of browsers I would expect maybe >95%, normally only security concerns cause people to turn it off.

Javascript is probably the way to go as it can then be crawled by GoogleBot (aslong as all links are present in the markup when the page loads). Now, many years later, Google cannot crawl flash very well or even at all in most cases.

Stick with HTML where possible.

85% is a very high bounce rate.

23% is very respectable but of course will vary depending on how targeted the traffic is