Price Comparison Website And Keywords

[MrPenguin]

I run a price comparison website for a small niche at http://cdkeyprices.com

I am targeting keywords for the specific products I am comparing the price/merchants on. On a typical page I would have a price column, product name, the merchant and a buy button. Buy button is affiliate linked to the merchant.

The product name in the product column is the name from the actual website I am tracking. As such, my keyword was appearing sometimes up the 30 times.

I've took it down some months ago but was wondering if this was a bad move. I was concerned Google would think I was stuffing the keyword. I've only just gotten into SEO the past few months so was not able to  see any changes.

Should i put the product column back up or would it be considered over optimization?

[crackingmedia]

Hi Mark

In my opinion, yes, to repeat the same product name up to 30 times on a page which doesn't have very much text-based copy which your product pages don't seem to have would appear spammy. Also visually, for the site visitor, to have a product name repeated down a long column wouldn't look great either.

If you want to better optimise your product pages then I would look to increase the word count on the products themselves. With the list of Vouchers on the right-hand side and the About Us at the bottom the amount of repeating content on each page is about equal to the amount of unique content.

By adding more unique content to your product pages (e.g. more info on the games themselves) you will make the page more useful to the buyer and give search engines more to bite into. I also suggest you test out a few pages in Moz's On-Page Grader to help you better evaluate where you can make worthwhile changes.

I hope that helps,

Peter

[vmialik]

Removing was probably a safe bet. Why are you considering putting it back?

Does it help your customers? No, then dont put it back. Yes, then maybe, why does it look over-optimized to you?

Can you explain a bit more of what you mean by, "The product name in the product column is the name from the actual website I am tracking. As such, my keyword was appearing sometimes up the 30 times." ? Is it in a product descriptions with significant amount of information that is relevant to the customer? If so, then you can edit the text to make sure your keyword density is below 10% or 5% just to be on the safe side. Unless you mean something else by the product column. Like Peter said adding relevant content to balance the keyword ratio could really help, fundamentally relevant content is great its great for SEO, if that is possible.

[MrPenguin]

Thanks for your replies!

Vadim, what I mean is I get a feed of the products listed on a particular shop. I display their data "as is" which means whatever they name their product on their store is how it appears as mine, in a list with all the other merchants. I have since taken this off as mentioned

For example, previously, if I was comparing prices for a Sony Z1 Camera my product page would look like

Amazon Buy Sony Z1 Camera $19.99

CameraCentral.com Sony Camera $22.99

Camera.com Z1 Sony Camera $40.11

CameraOnline.com Buy Sony Z1 Camera $55

etc

I removed the product name column in case it was key word stuffing!

Thanks again

[vmialik]

Yea I would limit this to a lower number to few important comparisons not all highest, lowest, and few middle priced, and maybe most know stores. Adding content will help to mitigate this as well. But if its under 5 I dont think that should be a red flag