do product pages really need 'fresh content'?

[MelissaLB]

ok, i know this topic has been discussed previously but a co-worker and i are butting heads about a few ideas and we cant seem to agree on how to analyze the slow decline of some of the larger categories of our product skus.

Keeping in mind that we were never directly affected by the panda/quality content updates, we are tryign to regain some traction in rank but cant agree on what to test or if it's even worth it.

So the question is, we've got 1000's of product pages and the descriptions are about 50-75 words long and they are all written pretty systematically. It's written by us but once you describe a product and the product doesn't change, what more can you really do when 2 years have passed and you still carry that product but it is no longer selling and there is nothing to add to the description?

We show related products with each one, now would updating the related products really make much difference at all? The products that link to each other would change, google would re-crawl, but would that do anything at all? would that be considered 'fresher' or not at all?

We are not an affiliate of any kind, we've got a warehouse full of in-stock items with about 10,000 product pages but cant seem to stabilize good rankings on anything other than our category pages.

Any advice from others who've had these issues and made any changes to their product rankings whether it be through content, or reworking the internal link structure or otherwise?

[bhartzer]

I have generally found that product descriptions that are about 50-75 words long are "light on content" and could use more words to describe them.

You may want to start a blog or a section of the site that feature certain products, and has extensive information about them. Could be a blog, with more photos, video(s), reviews, etc.. Certainly your more profitable or best-selling products might be ones to focus on first.

You do have related products, and that will continue to help--but user reviews could be added, as well.

The next step would be to start working on more deep links to your products and category pages, links from other sites. Social bookmarks and using other social sites such as Pinterst come to mind.

[MelissaLB]

in the past we've allowed customer reviews but found trying to get our customers to actually take the time to write a review rather painful. They are mainly low cost products that the buyer just wants then wants to move on.

As far as the related products where you say that will help is there any added benefit in updating those, or perhaps lets say if i have 10 products in one category and i want the focus to be on 1 or two of those products, woudl there be any value in adding those 1 or 2 products as a related product to the other 8 products in the category? Would this signal to google that this product is important based on internal linking or would this just be a lost cause?

As far as social media we've actually done well with that. FB and twitter buttons on each product (havent made the jump to the g+ button yet, still on the fence) and we've been gaining a lot of traction with fb likes recently (quite quickly too due to contest marketing actually) but we've not seen any effect on either traffic, conversions and ranking. As for the social shopping sites, we've been in those for years and are heavily linked to from many of the big ones. yet still cant gain much ground in google to get past, for instance, a seller that is from another continent that has a few more skus than we do.

It's funny you mention pinterest as well, i think they frown upon businesses adding their own products, am i wrong? or do you mean adding a "Pin it" widget to the product pages?

[bhartzer]

Would this signal to google that this product is important based on internal linking or would this just be a lost cause?

Where the related products links helps is where certain products get more internal links from "on topic" or "related" pages. Pages that have more internal links generally are more "important", so if you can add more internal links from "on topic" pages then it should help.

I would add the Google +1 button, especially if you want the potential to rank better in Google. After all, it's being used right here in WebmasterWorld.

Where have you heard that "they" frown upon businesses adding their own products? Certainly you could hire someone else to social bookmark or "pin" your products, if that was a concern to you.

I believe in testing--so you may want to test adding the "pin it" widget for a month or so and see if you get any ROI from it.

[Novus]

I have a few thousand products on two different ecommerce sites, that could well be described as content lite-ish, but re-writing them would a monumental task, I have not seen any effect from Panda, unless they are poorly written & optimised I would not re-do them.

What I would do at the very least is;

You may want to start a blog or a section of the site that feature certain products, and has extensive information about them. Could be a blog, with more photos, video(s), reviews, etc.. Certainly your more profitable or best-selling products might be ones to focus on first.

Failing that try to change a 10 or so. and see what happens. My guess is, its probably not worth it to re-wite them all.