Under Chinese tradition, 2012 ushers in the Year of the Dragon. For retailers and marketers hoping to boost their natural search rankings in the com- ing months, this new year could be dubbed the Year of Content. The relationship between original, updated and popular content on an e-commerce site, and potentially higher search rankings for a brand, merchant or product page, is hardly unknown. What’s new for 2012, however, is how Google Inc.’s latest major update to its search algorith—those mathematical formulas that carry so much weight in digital marketing—is pushing retailers to offer stronger content on their web sites, update that content more often and encourage those in-bound links that signal page quality to the search engine.
Retailers with relatively little original content are scrambling for more, while those web merchants that have long had staffers producing how-to articles, product demonstrations and the like are working toward improvements. Not even the most agile online retailer can just sit by and hope Google smiles favorably upon it, not with the latest major update—launched last fall and commonly called Fresh— promising to affect 35% of all search results, according to the search engine, which accounted for 65% of search traffic in November, accord- ing to comScore Inc.
Retailers with relatively little original content are scrambling for more, while those web merchants that have long had staffers producing how-to articles, product demonstrations and the like are working toward improvements. Not even the most agile online retailer can just sit by and hope Google smiles favorably upon it, not with the latest major update—launched last fall and commonly called Fresh— promising to affect 35% of all search results, according to the search engine, which accounted for 65% of search traffic in November, accord- ing to comScore Inc.
“Google is getting smarter about how it crawls pages and updates rankings,” says Seth Besmertnik, CEO of Conductor Inc., a web marketing firm that specializes in search engine optimization, the art and science of moving up in natural search rankings frequently referred to as SEO. “Now Google is so fast, it wants its rankings to reflect that. Retailers will have to rethink pages that don’t change.”
First came Panda
First came Panda
The Fresh update from late last year was foreshadowed early in 2011 by another update from Google called Panda, which the search engine estimated would affect 12% of searches. The update was designed to punish what Google views as low-quality web sites, which includes those with unoriginal content, such as retail sites that rely on the same manufacturer product descriptions that many other e-retailers display. It also sought to downgrade sites that web users seemed to find of little value. Google is notoriously vague about how it determines which sites are well regarded, but SEO specialists say an e-commerce site is likely to be downgraded if it fails to attract links from reputable sites, without paying for them. Paid links are worse than no links at all—if a retailer gets caught by Google. Both Overstock.com
Inc. and J.C. Penney Co. Inc. were penalized by Google last year for soliciting paid links; Overstock later reported that the downgrade in Google’s search rankings cost it 5% of its revenue during the several weeks when the penalty was in force.
While many retailers reported only some impact from Panda— home improvement retailer Build.com, for instance, says its search rankings were affected no more than 5% either up or down—a few suffered.
While many retailers reported only some impact from Panda— home improvement retailer Build.com, for instance, says its search rankings were affected no more than 5% either up or down—a few suffered.
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