E-Commerce for All

E-Commerce Tips, Tricks and Tribulations
Sunday
November 2, 2008
12:11 pm

Does My Online Store have Duplicate Content?

Google is all over duplicate content, your site will suffer for it. But what exactly is duplicate content? The biggest problem is, Google doesn’t always tell you there is a problem, you can set up Google Alerts on your domains and addresses, but that’s no help for code, and template duplication. So I will try to cover the most popular ways to get pages excluded from main search for duplicate content.

  1. Your site uses both plain http://website and http://www.website URL protocol. Use a redirect or mod rewrite to fix this. This canonical redirect will help Google understand that the www & non-www are NOT 2 separate pages. You see, urls are like phone numbers, unique for every user… So Google thinks these 2 versions of your domain’s urls are in fact different numbers, so to speak.
  2. Your site has no standardized handling method for the entry page, or default indexing. This means the index/default/main page can be viewed live & independently of the www.mysite.com. You fix this with a 301 or permanent redirect. For example /index.html is exactly the same page as your domain url.
  3. If you use a template, this dramatically increases th opportunity for content duplication by using dynamic site elements across many or all pages.  To combat this, when page specific text is added, it must be ENOUGH text to make that page stand out and be unique from the other templated pages.
  4. Change your Meta tags and page titles for every page. This one is 100% easy and highly important. Use the <head> elements to properly describe the page and you will be fine.
  5. If you are going to share files across domains, link them ….yes even your own stuff can be duplicate content.
  6. In your Google Webmaster Tools it is advisable the you choose a preferred domain under the diagnostic tab, and by all means while you are there check out your content analysis for duplicate information Google has found in your site.
  7. The #1 duplication issue I see amoung the stores we analyze is product description duplication. You MUST write great unique product descriptions for your product to be successful. Using the manufacturers description creates content that is duplicate in whole or partially with every other distributer… Many time the supplier as well. I’m thinking your site is NOT the authority for this content and Google will not display your products for search.
  8. Your robots.txt WILL NOT block your page from being indexed… You must block them with a noindex, nofollow or other means to specifically DISALLOW indexing of these pages.
  9. In general when adding textual content (product descriptions), paraphrase and add rich text ….that’s really what Google wants.  Unique pages perform well… Duplicate pages never show up.
  10. Be extremely careful with content generators, most times the content is duplicate. Try paying a college student to write the copy for you… Good investment!

We theorize that 70% of your total page must be unique. Here are a few tools to help check it:

How do I know I have duplicate content in Google?

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Posted in E-Commerce SEO | 2 Comments »

Saturday
September 13, 2008
3:09 pm

Shopping Cart Duplication - #1 Cause

At PRO-Webs we complete a great deal of site reports, and this gives us a unique advantage for research, testing and identifying common mistakes. Today, we are going to let shop owners in on the biggest cause of content duplication we have seen to date… But first lets get in to some background and information about the less than stellar results of content duplication.

What is duplicate content?
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Most of the time when we see this, it’s unintentional or at least not malicious in origin: forums that generate both regular and stripped-down mobile-targeted pages, store items shown (and — worse yet — linked) via multiple distinct URLs, and so on. In some cases, content is duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or garner more traffic via popular or long-tail queries.

So duplicate content very simply put, is any content which is too similar to another page’s (any page’s) content indexed in Google. Duplicate content can cause a host of headaches and is certainly not a concrete foundation for a top performing online store. Why should shop owners care about duplicate content?… Simple Google and other search engines care a great deal.

This is really one of those times when you as a business owner needs to walk a mile in Google’s shoes. Google aims to deliver the best UNIQUE content for every search… This is what Google, the business, does for their customers. As I am sure you as a shop owner want the best for your customers, you can clearly understand why Google would not want the same content in 5 different results to deliver their users. So if there is duplicate content… What does Google do about it?

In theory, when Google is presented to 2 pages which are not unique enough to rank independently, they make a decision as to which page to rank for the terms. There is very certainly a very complicated algorithmic computation Google does to determine which page to rank… But that really matters little. Generally speaking, the site which has the greatest authority for the content will rank and the other is shunned from the main search-able index. There is likely a ton of metrics used to determine authority for this purpose, but the largest factors are likely to be PageRank, relevant links, traffic and the age of the page. Seriously though… The simple truth is if you stole it and published it, you are not going to be able to rank it properly.

So back to the purpose of this post…

What is the #1 cause of content duplication in shopping carts?

Many shop owners are distributing or drop shipping the product base from their online store. The drop shipper or main distribution source will nearly always provide product information and descriptions for the products they wish you to sell. In our hast and waste to launch our new store or new product, many shop owners will use all or some large blocks of the distributors or manufacturers product information… UHOH

There are really only 2 factors of concern with regard to this type of content duplication.

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Monday
August 18, 2008
10:08 am

So You Want to be a Shop Owner Part 5 of 5

Welcome to PRO-Webs “So You Want to be a Shop Owner” Series conclusion # 5 Got My Store in Development, Now What? If you are just stopping by the first time today then you may want to catch up on the previous Shopping Cart Development Guide posts in this series. To sum it up, we have been stepping through the development decisions, processes and shopping cart software options involved in building an online store.

So you want to be a Shop Owner Series Conclusion

By this point your new ecommerce store is in the final development stages and you will soon be able to add products and begin to sell your products. No doubt this is an exciting prospect, but the final development stages and adding your products and categories is by far the most crucial piece of any e-commerce store’s development.  The decisions you make now regarding the category structure, navigation and layout tweaking for your online store can easily make or break any shopping cart project’s success.

Lets get started with adding products and categories.  Whether you or a store development company is adding your products and categories to your store matters little… There are some extremely important decisions to be made in categorization and product grouping.  The biggest problem with this organizational stage of development is the “lack of forgiveness” for mistakes.  You see, once your category structure in laid out and indexed by the search engines, you really do NOT want to change the structure.  Not only do changes of this magnitude cause “flux” for your site’s search rank in Google, but MANY times changing a product category, name or group will cause the page’s url to change.  This can be VERY bad, especially on a large scale and can cause your site to be temporarily pulled from Google’s index or sandboxed.  This sandboxing period in which Google attempts to digest your content and determine if it is trusted can last a very long time. The longest sandboxing I have seen was 90 days.

About the sandbox: While in the sandbox, all or some, of your store’s pages will be pulled from Google’s index.  This “Sandbox effect” seems to be occurring less and less, but for new and low authority site’s the danger still exists. They are not only not search-able, but not in the index at all.  Large scale content and page changes can easily cause this and there is no clear way to remedy it.  The length of time in the sandbox is directly related to many factors within Google’s ranking algorithm.  I believe the most weighted ranking conditions are related to the site’s index score and TrustRank.  In a nutshell, does Google trust your site?

If you happen to get yourself sandboxed, again little can be done but wait.  However, you might build some strong, organic, one way links to the sandboxed pages.  Build and submit a new sitemap to Google and check that you have good PCI compliance type metrics in place, such as privacy page and a proper SSL.  If you are not accepting credit cards, shame on you, but… You do not need an SSL.  However, IF you are going to use one, DO NOT use a crappy shared SSL…

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Monday
July 28, 2008
10:07 am

Great Navigation Pays the Bills!

One of the singular most important things you can do for your online store is define a clear easy to follow navigational structure. The benefits are really astounding. Today I will cover a few common mistakes, and some very easy and logical fixes. You will see that the results can come very quickly… So in a couple of days you will be able to tweak any obvious flow issues still existing or that you may have created.

First things first, if you are running a Flash or Java menu while they look cool, the search engine’s spiders cannot effectively follow the links out from them. You don’t necessarily have to get rid of them, just make some hard links with great anchor text somewhere, like in the footer.
The rule of thumb seems to be 3 clicks… Anything more than 3 clicks from your main page is going to have to have serious promotion and flow of it’s own to develop properly. People just don’t statistically click that far out without becoming sidetracked. So its just good practice to stay within 3 clicks when possible. I generally like to use a “landing” or “category” page type scenario from the main page, this helps your shoppers find the location in your store containing the most relevant information for what they are seeking. I would advise against tricking users in to clicking into areas, I really think if they click once and find what they thought they would…Then they are far more likely to click again.

Linking all of your products from your main page is not recommended. Google itself recommends less than 100 total URLs on any single page. Yes… Perhaps they should improve GoogleBot, but until then you want a good crawl. There is much navigational value in the “landing” page or “category” page setup, not to mention these types of pages will likely have higher Ad scores in your PPC (Pay per Click) campaigns as well. These “Category” pages which are likely linked from your main page navigational menu, act like little web stores all of their own. Give them rich textual content, unique Meta and title information and tight relevant content to reflect the category’s product line. You will start to see these pages ranking for their content without your main page and this is exactly what we want. A little on page attention and they will gather some organic backlinks for themselves too. If you really want to boost this process, submit these pages to some deep link directories for their page’s theme using concise yet keyword rich anchor text. Remember to vary the titles and descriptions a little to make your scope broader and more effective. Stay away from the reciprocals… Building links is hard work, why would you do the same work for less than full link value?

Another very serious consideration and issue with e-commerce platforms is the amount of products or listing in any given category. When you have too many products in a category and users are expected to click that next button 14 times you might as well just hang it up because they won’t!

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