Panda hit many ecommerce stores in February 2011 and with every new iteration their tales were riddled with new SEO horrors, from losing ranks to simply being thrown out of the index. And it seemed that things were only going from bad to worse.
Recently, Panda 3.9.1 release brought up the hopes for some of these stores. Even my blog saw an increase in visitors, although I had no issue because of Panda.
Panda is meant to hit websites with shallow or duplicate content and it can trigger a sitewide loss in rankings. If you read the following phrase from this Google post you will understand why this algo update was a big alarm signal for all ecommerce sites out there:
One more thing to understand is that Panda is like a "filter" that is run once in every month. It is not run the instant Google needs to rank a site because it is costly to do so. Hence, these monthly updates.
How Your Ecommerce Website Can Recover From Panda
Max Moritz published on SEO Book an article about recovering ecommerce sites from a Panda hit and gathered some interesting fact in there.
I will outline here only the conclusions of his hard work on getting out of Panda's ruthless wing:
- each page in your ecommerce site needs to have good content and it should not duplicate any other page (content of at least 300 words that uses images and videos is preferable)
- make sure you gather many reviews to add to the page's content and, if you only have a few products, make sure to hire a copywriter that can create the best content for you
- use product variations (options), and do not create separate product pages for different colors or sizes (duplicate content issues)
- remove product pages that do not perform well
- show products only in category pages, and hide the actual product pages (use it only if you really want this)
- disallow in robots.txt pages generated by the usage of parameters in pagination, search or variations
- make sure you do not have copied content form the manufacturer or other websites
Yes, you can recover from Panda, but that means a lot of work on your part. And many changes that might not suit you. In any case you will find it hard to change so many things, but remember: anything that can be changed, MUST be changed.
We don't really like it, but we are on Google's turf. Google is not really a democracy and it isn't a public service, thus we need to comply or fall behind.
Other Things To Keep In Mind Regarding Ecommerce and SEO
Hubspot comes up with very nice facts and stats from time to time and I want to mention only one here: 75% of B2B companies do not measure or quantify social media engagement.
The 33 stats from that post will outline the status of marketing in social media and, unsurprisingly, that email is still a big win for B2B companies.
Another thing to look at is that social media engagement results in more inbound links. This is the first time a study has been performed and presented with stats and correlation between backlinks and social media actions. Read more on SeoMoz blog.
And lastly, how many of you look at the autocomplete function in Google as an alarm signal? We all should search our brand in there form time to time and see what Google autocomplete comes up with.
In the link form above you can read about ORM- Online Reputation Management - an activity closely tied to SEO because it uses a mix of brand mentions, links, articles and brand searches in order to change the autocomplete Google shows for your brand.
Autocomplete suggestions are shown based on three factors:
- search volume and searcher location
- mentions of the keyword on the web (whatever webpage has that keyword and the context it shows in)
- mentions all over the social networks
Basically, if you get enough people to write positively about your brand, to share content that speaks about your brand and to search in Google for "your_brand+positive keyword" you might be able to manipulate what autocomplete suggestions show up below the search box.
SEO is not dead, at least the basic activities of it. Some things might change and you need to keep up. Unfortunately we cannot say if tomorrow the things will be the same as yesterday.