Too many articles within ecommerce site?

[William.Lau]

So recently purchased an ecommerce site to work on with lots of potential. The site was effected by Penguin update and now I am trying to fix up some issues.

One of the problems I think may be the articles that he had written within the site. The site is an ecommerce site but has lots of articles like how to's and tips.

A lot of these articles are not very fluent but seems to be written for SEO. Should I just remove them entirely or should I just stuff them in the back somewhere.

[EGOL]

Articles on an ecommerce site can be a great thing.  I have been spending most of my time recently blogging and writing articles for ecommerce.

Those articles can pull traffic, they speak to the expertise of your staff, they show that you care about customers using your products properly, they help customers select your products and if they are superbly written and extremely informative then can help you get links that improve your rankings.

But, if those article suck then they could be damaging to your business.

[William.Lau]

Are you using the articles as a subdomain/subfolder? Or within the ecommerce platform?

For me, each category has their own dedicated description 200-300 words.

[EGOL]

I am writing articles that focus on the use of individual products.  They are about 500 to 1500 words and usually have 3 to 8 photos.  Some have a video.   I started working on them in November and now some of those articles rank in the top three positions of google for the product and my product page ranks immediately below or above them.

When a visitor lands on one of the article pages there are links in the article to the sales page and also some "house ads" on the article page for related products.

Some of the videos are now ranking in the top three positions of  youtube search for the product or a related query.  Some of these also appear in the google search results.

I don't do linkbuilding but these articles have gotten some natural links from dremel and other how-to-do-it sites.

These articles are all on dreamweaver pages or in a /blog/ folder (wordpress).  I use "buy buttons" on dreamweaver pages rather than an ecommerce platform.

[donford]

Willny

In general there is no such thing as too much content. But you mentioned that some of the articles seem not fluent.. that could be another way of saying they are spammy. If this is the case simply go through the articles and make them sound natural.

Subdomain vs directories. In most all cases you want to go with directories or pages, as sub-domains can be viewed as separate websites completely.

If the site was hit by Penguin / Panda then the previous owner probably did some un-natural stuff to try and rank. This may explain why his articles seem spammy it may also indicate a bigger problem like buying links / exchanging links / and blantant spamming on forums / blogs / social media. Make sure you look at the backlink structure of the site before you go killing pages.

Hope that helps