Internet Retailer Chicago 2010 (IRCE) just ended and there was an underlying concern with some of the retailers we met with at the show. Traffic for SOME general retailers who sell thousands of products and SKU’s from a variety of manufacturers is down – sometimes considerably. Invariably, we would ask the client if they have seen a substantial drop in traffic for their product/item pages from organic search – and the common answer was “Yes! How did you know?” This is a direct result of the “Mayday Update”.
If your business pulls item and product descriptions directly from a manufacturer and serves that exact content on your product pages, with literally no unique enhancements, then you are likely a victim of the Google MayDay update. A retailer has to create a unique value proposition and consumer experience for their own brand — and not merely regurgitate the manufacturer’s information to the human visitor.
Watch the following video from Matt Cutts, Google Webspam Engineer, which gives a high-level overview of the MayDay Update:
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
• This is an algorithmic change & a deliberate update that has been tested & vetted by Google
• It’s permanent & not temporary — helps Google assesses which sites are the best match for long-tail queries and offer value to the human visitor
• MayDay has nothing to do with Caffeine Update — completely independent
• Add great content & make your site an authority at the product detail level (aka “long tail”)
• Over 400 changes per year to Google algorithms (quality changes, tweaks, adjustments, etc)
WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?
Invest the time, energy and resources into tweaking your Meta tags and product descriptions for these long-tail page types so that they are unique to your business and not an exact duplicate from the manufacturer – which is most likely shared by your competitors. Uniqueness and market differentiation appears to be a fundamental factor in the Mayday update — where Google is showing preference to those retailers who have their own unique value proposition and unique product descriptions that adds value to the human visitor. Think about duplicate content and how that is occurring across your site, your competitors and the manufacturers of the products you sell. It can be equated to the thin-affiliate model – the original source of content wins while the “copycats” are often omitted from the main index.
Programmatically tweaking and thus scaling your unique product &/or SKU descriptions is a great way to move your site back in the right direction, if you’ve seen a considerable drop in Google organic traffic — primarily for long-tail keywords. By leveraging a powerful SEO technology, you can extract all your pages and then begin scaling your product-page template optimization at a database level — combining formulas with manual optimization. Do you facilitate on-page product ratings or product reviews from your customers? Does your CMS intelligently cross-promote similar products the customer may wish to purchase? These are all ways to ensure uniqueness at the product-page level.
As we’ve discussed in the past, long tail keywords are most heavily influenced in SEO by relevant, unique on-page and site structure elements. “Head” or “Mid-Tail” keywords are influenced by unique, relevant on-page attributes but heavily influenced by external and internal anchor text links. You have to differentiate yourselves — or fall victim to the permanent algorithm updates of MayDay.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Very interesting article. My e-commerce company has been customizing our product page content for 4 years now. The issue we are finding is that there is little one can do from having competitors pilfering that content and posting it on their e-commerce site. It’s hard to prove that information which was modified by us is copyrightable. It is even harder to prove damages.
Any thought or suggestions to combat this issue would be greatly appreciated and welcomed!
Paul – if you have *original* content that is your own creation (not from the manufacturer) and entire pages are being duplicated by competitors, word for word — then you I think you have a couple of options. I’ve been through this before with a couple of clients and the following steps proved successful (in one way or another):
1) Send a cease & decist letter to the site owner, explaining that they are in violation of DMCA policies and must immediately take down &/or modify the content which they have stolen from you
2) If Option 1 doesn’t work, contact their hosting company to let them know they are serving a site in violation of DMCA policies and it is their responsibility to not serve such violators
3) If Option 2 doesn’t work, then submit DMCA complaints to the major search engines. Archive.org can show you had the content first and were the original author (if in fact that is the true). Filing this complaint will typically have the offenders content removed from the SE’s index if they find them to be in violation.
If none of these work, consider that engines fight this problem daily — and was a factor in the MayDay update. If you were the “original” author and thus based on historical cache dates you can be credited, odds are copy cats that come along should not so much hurt you, as hurt themselves. If your site is authority, solid backlinks (branded & non-branded keyword relevant anchor text) then you’ll typically win this battle with rankings. Anchor text backlinks can be a good trump card (blogs, PR, articles, partners, social media, etc).
Hope that helps!
If you have any further questions, you can private message me: scott AT triangledirectmedia.com.