SEO Affect of Product Directories

[johngwms]

I have most of our products listed on Applegate Stock on Line, Find the Needle etc in addition to our store www.TheDebugStore.com.

Each of these product listings includes a deep link (follow) to the product page on our store. Searching for a particular product on Google will bring up page results from these sites as well as our own.

We also list these products on Amazon, which does not, of course link back to product pages on our site but does bring in some sales revenue.

I am concerned that these sites may be damaging our SEO ranking for the following reasons:

1) Duplicate content. The products descrtiptions are the same as on our site. We have over 1,000 products do creating unique copy for each site is not very practical.

2) I appreciate that inbound links from multiple quality domains may be preferable to lots of links from one domain, even though the quality of the links from a searchers point of view is helpful.

3) I do struggle to get good organic search positions for our own product pages. I am wondering if these directories are affecting that.

I would really appreciate your opions

John

[Mike Hughes]

For me this is a fairly simple situation:

1. The first place people go to find things online is Google.

2. To do well in Google you want your content to be unique.

3. While other marketing efforts might be important, you should do your best to limit the negative impact they might have on your google rankings.

So, I would not push copies of my web page content out to other websites and would make sure the content and the meta descriptions are unique on the product directory pages. Probably the easiest way to do this is to just give them a subset of the product data as the whole point of the exercise is to get propective customers to come to your website.

Mike

[johngwms]

I agree with you entirely Mike.

Sometimes it is difficult to see the wood from the trees.

Can you see any SEO benefits of using a product directory?

John

[Mike Hughes]

Can you see any SEO benefits of using a product directory?

The obvious benefit from an SEO perspective is the links. I wouldn't expect a huge gain because of the type of links they are, the anchor text used and the typically low to non-existest PR the pages have but for many specialised products even one weak external link is better than none.

On the whole I think there is a net benefit. I suspect Google's algorithms permit to a wide range of legitimate marketing efforts and only really kick in when these are seriously abused. So, for example, trying to rank above your competitors just through being in lots of product directories would probably trigger a penalty algorithm but being in one or two directories should be OK.*

Mike

* This is my belief based on the personal opinion that google are good guys. They want to stop the SEO spammers from abusing the system, but at the same time don't want to penalise genuine businesses for using legitimate marketing efforts. The obvious differentiators I see between the two is the level of effort applied and the focus on one particular methodology.

Or to use a straightforward analogy. One or two alcoholic drinks with food and/or friends = Responsible drinker. Drinks a bottle or two of vodka alone and doesn't eat = Alcoholic.