Google
released the friendly sounding update Panda into the wild over a year ago, and
the bamboo it was supposed to munch on were content farms. Content farms
included sites such as eHow and typically had a lot of content written by a lot
of people on a lot of different topics, all highly SEO’d to rank for a
multitude of search terms, such as “How to Bath Your Dog” or “How to Get
Dressed in the Morning in Richmond VA.”
Bluntly,
content farms were asking for a Google update to take them out: they provided
very poorly written content, churned out by ‘professional writers’ who could
barely string two words together without using an exclamation point!
Point?
Panda
targeted “thin content”, which broadly means poorly written English, repetitive
regurgitation, low word counts, a large number of pages on the site and
providing little in the way of value to human readers.
The
problem with this description is we are also describing an eCommerce site and
Panda cannot tell between a badly written content farm and high-value,
commercial site delivering real value.
Ecommerce
sites typically have:
Lots
of Pages
Because
they offer lots of products, and even where the product line is restricted,
there will be lots of options. Think colors and sizes for one V-Neck T-shirt
and suddenly you see how many pages can be created for one very simple product.
Duplicated
Content
Duplicate
content provides zero SEO benefit, and with Panda it is waving a red rag at a
stampeding bull. But use our t-shirt site again, and you can see you cannot
really write something that different about a red t-shirt or a blue one: the
only difference is the color.
Another
issue for Ecommerce sites is that they frequently take a product description,
especially if it is technical in nature, from the manufacturer or master
distributor’s site and paste it into their own product pages.
Low
Word Counts
Again,
just how much can you say about a t-shirt?
Seriously,
try to write 400 words on t-shirts of any kind…and then think of the task
extrapolated out for S, M, L, XL and XXL variations then multiplied out further
by color variations and this is even before we get to different styles.
It is
usual to see a product page which is heavy on images with a light touch when it
comes to the word count.
Read more at http://tinyurl.com/cs2868d
