SEO Codes

In SEO industry nowadays, everyone is talking about the impact of Google Panda. There are a few sites who managed to escape its slap while many others are burned to the ground. According to Google’s statement regarding the Panda update, this line could be the most important to bear in mind for any webmaster:

“... In addition, it’s important for webmasters to know that low quality content on part of a site can impact a site’s ranking as a whole. ...”

That means that if a part of your site has low quality content (according to Google’s latest definition of it), the ranking of your site as a whole could suffer. From that insight, one area which is greatly affected is the ecommerce sites. Ecommerce sites run afoul on a number of things that Google might now consider low-quality content. The following point out how ecommerce sites might be penalized according to Google’s description of low quality content:

Shallow Content: This is very common to ecommerce sites which have many products with little or no product description. Usually, we see a widget having a short product description in an ecommerce site but even a descriptive sentence is not enough and might still be considered as shallow content. The ideal one is a 250-word product description for each product but if you can’t come up with that, at least, a minimum of 100 words is acceptable.

Duplicate Content: Again, most ecommerce sites violate this. If your site has the same content page after page, Google will pick just one of them to rank. For instance, if you have 10 widgets although in different sizes but have identical description, it is still considered an internal duplicate content. Although it won’t hurt the ranking of your entire site, only one of those pages will be ranked. Also, your description for every product and category as well as your meta description should be unique.

Copied Duplicate Content: This one is almost the same with internal duplicate content but your content is coming from another website. An example of this is an ecommerce site which is the site owner as well as a distributor. Typically, it will just copy the product description from the manufacturer. Now, that is considered a copied duplicate content. If you violate this, it could hurt the rankings of your entire site even if only a few pages on your site are using that copied duplicate content.

Those were the categories in which the Google Panda affects ecommerce sites. Now, we know that even if only a part of your ecommerce site has what Google sees as low quality content, the ranking of your entire site can suffer as a result.