Has a product portfolio bad (direct) influence on rankings because of less relevant content?

[videriconcept]

Hey SEO's,

I'm wondering if a bad product portfolio of a e-commerce website has an influence (direct) on the rankings because of less relevant content.

To show you what I'm thinking about, look at these two situations:

1. E-Commerce website with 3.000 products from different brands (all top brands) but the products itself are not quite up to date

2. E-Comerce website with 3.000 products from differend brands (all top brands) but these products contain allways the top seller items.

Is it possible, that Google has an index for "fresh content" or "highly demanded content" or something like this which has direct influence on the ranking?

I ask this question besides the fact, that its of course allways better to have the top sellers in a portfolio than not have. But the big thing is: What to do if you don't know which products are best, or you just don't get them from your retailers or some other reason...

For Google & Co. its harmfull (I guess) to put a e-commerce website without top-seller products into the top-rankings with high competition!?

Any ideas on that?

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Florian

I don't think this would have any real impact and I can only speak in general terms but there are always people searching for older products.

If the pages are dead, you don't have stock any longer and are not doing any traffic then it may make sense to remove them as it's a poor user experience to find something and then not be able to order it but beyond that, the standard ecommerce SEO:

• make your product descriptions unique
• Don't have rafts of thin content
• try to offer some content that the competition does not
• - video reviews
• - comparisons etc
• make sure your pagination for category pages is optimised
• good call to action on product page
• external reviews

So, to answer your original question, I would say it is not harmful to have these older products but if the pages are weak and feature lots of duplicate product descriptions and the like then they may be harmful but not for the reasons you suspect.

Some further reading:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ecommerce-seo-making-product-pages-into-great-content-whiteboard-friday

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-onpage-optimization-for-ecommerce-websites

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content

Hope this helps!
Marcus

[William.Lau]

Yes freshness does help.

In your regards to your problem, best sellers are usually best selling items within your own business/site. So generally all these stats would be from your own business. Whats been selling and what hasn't been selling.

If a certain product is converting on your site, it would make sense to show that it is a top seller to create more conversions.

Lets say a visitor comes to your site basically to buy shirts, but one of your 'retailers'/brands sell more jeans than usual, then that top seller would not benefit your visitors.

It is your business and you should use those implications to decide what to put on that list.