Use of manufacturer's branding on ecommerce product pages?

[robert76]

The fact that Panda seems to favor branding such as manufacturer's sites and big brands (i.e. big box, dept. stores, A) has been mentioned frequently.

I've studied this affect and find it reaches into Ecommerce sites other than the type mentioned. I've concluded that when
I hear how Panda favors branding, I may have been thinking about branding the wrong way.

I find that many non-Pandasized Ecommerce sites, across a wide variety of product categories, include detailed information about the brand they are selling on their product pages. It appears separately from the product description and in one of these manners:

-above product description
-below product description
-above product description and below product description with separate copy in each location

An example of this information (made-up):
"Blah Blah Company is a well-respected manufacturer known for their high quality, handcrafted carved wood widgets and accessories. They have been in business for X years. Combining traditional and contemporary styles, Blah Blah Company produces original pieces that are very distinct and fit into many types of interior and exterior locations. Blah Blah has a warehouse in X and Y and they have a reputation for quality products. They normally ship their merchandise within 48 hours."

Sites using such approach are doing so in a templated manner on every item the site carries from the supplier. Hundred of items = hundred times on the site. And often times this information is supplied by the manufacturer so then it appears across many sites.

Obviously this is a terrible amount of duplicate content and not a practice I wish to follow, yet, I can't help notice that Panda is clearly rewarding this behavoir. I have even found sites with product pages ranking on page 1 that contain product name, price, skip product description altogether, and just contain the information about the manufacturer. There is no actual information about the product itself.

If you have a paragraph about manufacturer's information, I conclude that you are golden. It takes even more importance than the product description itself. Is including it the way out of Panda?

[enigma1]

ecommerce sites are ranked differently by the search engines than other type of sites. The text content maybe minimal but the product name, model, brand, price, category are critical and are present.

It's because visitor will go there to buy something that's the whole purpose not to study or do analysis. The combination of the ecommerce keywords is what will attract the customer, for example

blue widget models by example.com on sale for $

name, brand, model, category, price is what will attract the customer. If you start expanding on details in the important pages with long product descriptions or manufacturer history it may bring the opposite results as the page loses focus.

[robert76]

["If you start expanding on details in the important pages with long product descriptions or manufacturer history it may bring the opposite results as the page loses focus."]

What I'm seeing is that it can be minimal product description and minimal manufacturer history. It can also be minimal manufacturer history without product description. But it seems it must have the manufacturer history, or "brand story" portion to not be impacted by Panda.

[enigma1]

You should expect it with branded products and ecommerce. Manufacturer binds to the product and has high relevancy so just mentioning it with a very short paragraph is sufficient. People usually search for:

branded widgets or widgets from brand etc.

So you need to mention the brand in some way and a bit of history about the brand makes it relevant for the search I guess. The page title will include the product's name for sure.

But if I only mention widgets it may be generalized too much and now I have to compete with content sites that describe widgets.

[netmeg]

The assorted e-commerce sites I oversee have minimal manufacturer mentions (just the name and model number) - and no "brand story" other than for the site itself. None affected by any Pandas, and Google traffic up average 144% since January.

Personally, I'd be scared of that much duplicate content. I'd have to see it succeeding across a *huge* number of sites before I believed it was really a thing. I think it's more likely that those sites have other factors going for them.

[enigma1]

I don't think Google count it as duplicated content it tracks ecommerce sites by other factors. Otherwise any site that sells a product could be considered with duplicated content as the title is the same, there are "buy now", "on sale", "sku" and other combinations of words etc, which appear everywhere.

You may also need to check the meta-description on product pages, it's quite important.

[Robert Charlton]

Putting the branding "story" on product pages, IMO, shows a misunderstanding about how branding works on Google. I tend to believe the Google engineering description of branding, where they describe it in terms of trust, authority, buzz, reputation, and PageRank, etc. Branding is definitely not about telling a story about the manufacturer to Google on a product page.

Probably, and this is a guess, the sites that are using the branding story in their descriptions might be surviving because they are at least able to sell branded merchandise, putting them a cut above the Brand-X merchants that Google went after in MayDay. Yes... brands and things like model numbers are targeted in searches, so branded pages IMO do have an advantage over generic products in terms of bringing visitors to a site.

Brand stories might also contain vocabulary that (by chance or by intention) is about the product area, which could be more helpful on Google than having no such vocabulary at all. If good enough, they might also convince customers who've reached the page to buy, which might increase engagement on the site. It's very hard to generalize about such copy, as there are a great many factors about why a page and site ranks as well.

To guess further, looking at the downside of brand stories... if the brand stories are too much off topic, they're likely to ultimately hurt product page content by diluting it... and by simply not being useful or relevant. If the stories themselves are widely paraphrased, they'll also drive down the perceived originality of the pages they're on.

To the degree that the inclusion of these stories suggests a misperception of brands, I'd be wary about relying on them, as that kind of mechanical thinking can distort the goals you set for yourself when you build a site. The important "brand" the ecommerce site should be concerned about is its own brand as a merchant, and that's got to do with the quality and reputation of the site itself.

[robert76]

You may also need to check the meta-description on product pages, it's quite important.

It's taking this thread off on a tangent a little but can you elaborate on the importance? What does Google do with the meta-description other than possibly display it when a search is done? I agree it's important for what you want the user to see to drive them to the page but I thought use for other purposes, such as algorithm, have been seriously downgraded or even a non-factor.

[Robert Charlton]

The meta description is currently not important in ranking and hasn't been for some time.

It definitely can motivate click-throughs, and for that reason it's wise to pay attention to it... but it's not a ranking factor.

[enigma1]

Meta Description is important for query comparisons with google not only ctr by displaying a summary. It affects clickthrough in different ways and I think also helps spiders to locate the important page section at the moment. With ecommerce stores navigation is more complex than with a blog or business site. At the same time the important content maybe located in a tiny paragraph somewhere in the middle of the page after navigation.

For meta-description comparisons with sites see the comments and hints just over the 3min clip.
[youtube.com...]