My First Site to go Off the Bottom

[MrFewkes]

One of my sites, which is number 1 in the serps, has recently been pushed off the screen by a combination of the following attacks on the natural serps.

1. Increased Spacing - there just to push sites down.
2. Two adwords ads - with increased spacing.
3. 3 x Photos with a price of the item from other vendors (in the adwords area) giving 5 adwords ads.
4. 3 x Shopping results for..... from google.

This has reduced my traffic and ofcourse sales.

Thanks google - you clearly dont need my site anymore.

I knew this was coming - ive mentioned it a number of times here - but this is my first experience of it as far as I am aware.

Talk about google giving preference to their own property.

[tedster]

Google Products may be a Google property, but the listings there are created by merchants who sell those goods. Have you submitted a product feed for the items you sell?

[Marshall]

Google Products may be a Google property, but the listings there are created by merchants who sell those goods. Have you submitted a product feed for the items you sell?

I found for my one client who has a small ecommerce site that this helps to offset the fact her site was pushed down by exactly what MrFewkes describes. At least her site shows up under the "products" results which is, I think, a more fair playing field when it comes to competing with larger sites.

And for what it is worth, the site has been around for 12 years and up until last spring, always appeared in the top five results for her category. Draw whatever conclusion you like, but I think it support the OP's position.

Marshall

[netmeg]

Yah I would advocate anyone doing ecommerce to submit a feed to Google Products and Bing Shopping; sometimes you can get a better position there than you can in the regular organics.

[Planet13]

Yah I would advocate anyone doing ecommerce to submit a feed to Google Products and Bing Shopping; sometimes you can get a better position there than you can in the regular organics.

Question to all:

would you have a different product description on your site than the one you would have in your feed for google products? (The reasoning being to avoid duplicate content)

Also, is there any consensus on how to "optimize" for google products, if it is somehow different than optimizing for organic search?

[Planet13]

Talk about google giving preference to their own property.

You know, this brings up a disturbing question for me:

Exactly how does google plan on monetizing google products?

i don't think that google provides this service to us merchants for free out of kindness of their own hearts.

And because google has recently made guidelines for getting listed in google products much stricter (e.g., listing the SKUs / manufacturer product ID in the data feeds to facilitate price comparisons for users), I really think that they have something up their sleeves.

Possibly after google products becomes indispensable for us merchants, they will require merchants to accept google pay for products listed in google products?

[mrguy]

Google Products may be a Google property, but the listings there are created by merchants who sell those goods. Have you submitted a product feed for the items you sell?

Isn't Google renumerated in some way for sales through their products portal?

[Marshall]

Isn't Google renumerated in some way for sales through their products portal?

Only if people pay using Google Checkout. For now, Google Products is still free. However, they do make ad revenue on the paid results.

Marshall

[Marshall]

Just noticed this:

would you have a different product description on your site than the one you would have in your feed for google products? (The reasoning being to avoid duplicate content)

Google wants the same product description as it appears on your site. In fact, they often do a quality control by asking you to compare select pages to the feed for accuracy. In the Merchant Center you will see under Data Quality a line saying "Items to Assess Quality of your Data" where they will list random pages to check against the actual feed.

Marshall

[Planet13]

Thanks Marshall.

_{(It's been a long week and I was thinking about listing products on AMAZON and having the descriptions there being the same as on your site, thus possibly being duplicate content. Man, do I ever need a day off...)}

[Marshall]

Man, do I ever need a day off...

Don't we all :)

Marshall

[scooterdude]

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