UGC classifieds site

[themistral]

Hi guys,

I'm wondering how you would suggest dealing with creating meta and page titles for UGC content in order to rank for long tail search.

Here's the problem as I see it.
We have a classifieds website for one niche market.
The meta and page titles are dynamically generated from the user input.

The trouble is that there may be many examples of one product on our website. The title is generated as Make Model.

Obviously this means that we have multiple pages vying for the make/model long tail search.
I have thought about adding in the unique product id to make the title unique, but this wouldn't stop the pages vying for position.

In addition, these product pages will eventually expire when the adverts run out.

I think this is hurting us as we have recently seen a massive drop in traffic from long tail search.

Can anyone offer some advice as the best way to tackle this?

Thanks :)

[deadsea]

If somebody is searching for "widget", landing on a classified ad of a specific single item for sale is probably not the best user experience. "widget" would be a better title for a page on your site that lists all of the classified ads for that widget.

Is there a location that you could append to the title for each classified ad? Something like "Widget for Sale in Anytown, USA"

[themistral]

The problem is that the classifieds are generally used by companies (which was the plan) but they can be selling more than one of the same item.
These are generally second hand items, so the prices differ so we can't just say to them, add one product and put a quantity.

So you see, even by adding the town or the seller name, we are probably going to end up with duplicate titles...

I think I may go along the line of creating pages for the specific makes and take it from there.

Of course, as it's UGC, there are spelling mistakes and all sorts...

[Shaddows]

As I mentioned in the other thread, your Title Element is a critical componant of any page. It deserves due care and attention.

One solution would be a free-text field that people can use to Title their products- but this will require strong policing or a vogue seller could seriously damage your site.

To attempt to limit contagious damage, URLs might look like
shop.example.com/Seller1/ProductXYZ
seller1.example.com/ProductXYZ

There's no guarentee the SEs will respect that differentiation of course.

Not sure if these brandnames will survive a moderators review, but have you considered studying Gumtree or eBay for how they deal with potential issues?

Maybe this format would solve duplicate issue, reduce the potential for User Generated Chaos, and reduce your policing requirements:
Make, model, price, quantity, seller

With each specified as a required field to submit a product for sale.

[themistral]

Thanks Shaddows,

I'll check out Gumtree! And other classified sites!