Mass Referencing Supplier Product Info & SEO

[BeckyKey]

Hi

I have a mass referencing project which will mean taking between 1000-2000 SKUs from a supplier, taking all their content & loading it onto our site.

I need to make a case for not doing this from an SEO perspective. As these are pages I want to rank.

I'm going to push for optimising titles/meta titles before they're loaded in.

However if not, I may be forced to load in the products as they are & go back to optimise everything - does anyone see a real issue with this?

I know there are so many 'similar' descriptions of products on ecommerce sites & across the web, so how does Google deal with these? The pages won't be identical as the templates are different, but maybe 100-200 words of descriptions could be until we work through them.

Although this isn't ideal - what are the implications?

The problem for me is, the managers just want the products on the site, without much thought regarding organic traffic/categorisation initially.

Thanks!

[seanginnaw]

Hey,

I used to work for a company that had me loading on around 10,000 product SKUs into the system at one time. Rather than lifting the supplier descriptions of each item, we used excel to template up the descriptions of the products based on the stock information we had - ranges, sizes, materials etc. Page titles, however, we left auto generated by our CMS until we had a chance to go back and review them.

I would get them loaded on the site in bulk to get them indexed/available for product PPC bidding with the intention of coming back to them later to optimise - meta descriptions, page titles, product descriptions etc.

In the end I think we used a crowdsourcing platform like Elance to hire several freelancers to write the product descriptions uniquely. It was a great investment from an SEO and written copy perspective. Might be something to think about?

Cheers,

Sean

[BeckyKey]

Hi Sean

This is helpful thanks.

Did you see any drop in authority/rankings when loading them in unoptimised to start with?

Thanks!

[seanginnaw]

Hi Becky,

Authority-wise, they were product pages that were deep down in the IA of the site so they had very little PA anyway. And rankings-wise, they were very niche, branded products so we didn't have a great deal of competition anyway - rankings were always pretty good.

Even if you're selling something unbranded and generic, I would say that you should create the pages ASAP to start the ball rolling. You're not going to get penalized in the first instance of loading them on and when you come back later to optimise them, you should gain rankings.

Cheers,

Sean

[BeckyKey]

Great thank you!

[Everett]

Becky,

I think Sean has given you some great advice. I'd just like to add a few things.

I have seen rankings drop when sites add a bunch (thousands) of products with manufacturer descriptions and allow them to be indexed. I have seen rankings rise when these are either removed from the index, or improved with unique copy.

However, you have the manufacturer description so why not leverage it? One idea I have proposed to a few clients is to use that as the description provided to channel partners, affiliates and sites like Amazon, eBay and Google Shopping. Let them deal with the duplicate content while you keep yours unique. Otherwise you'll write all of that unique copy and within months they'll all have it on their sites (because you gave it to them in feeds) and that hard work and money will have been for nothing.