OnBuy Dynamic Content Insertion
The Brief
On larger websites (such as e-commerce sites with millions of SKUs), duplicate and thin content can quickly become a serious issue. We found that this was the case for OnBuy.com when we ran a report to find the percentage of duplicate content on a sample of product pages.
A report we ran showed that on some product pages, as much as 30% of the content had been duplicated/was published on third-party sites with a higher domain authority than the client site. This meant that Google was potentially not only seeing the content as duplicated/copied but also copied from a more authoritative and trustworthy source (where backlinks and referring domains are concerned). The result, many product pages not performing strongly in the search engine result pages (SERPs) and organic growth for the site was limited.
Our Strategy
After finding the issue, we knew that manually updating content was not going to be an option given the number of URLs involved (millions). Any solution would have to be quick, effective and scalable.
By exploring the site further, we concluded that the best way to tackle this problem would be to use the original and unique content already present on the millions of other indexed URLs. The best approach would be to dynamically insert content from other related product pages into the pages with duplicate content issues. This would help reduce the percentage of content found on each product page which would be duplicate and provide some added value to users who might be interested in similar products.
The Results
We were able to get most of the dynamic content insertion solutions implemented throughout December 2018 and within a couple of months we began to see some organic increases.
Considering that these changes were applied to millions of product URLs, we knew in advance that it would take time for Google to re-crawl old URLs, index the updated content and for any results to take full effect. Gradual increases continued throughout 2019 and after about 5 months, we saw a huge increase.
To date, the site has seen over a five-fold increase in organic traffic from before the changes were implemented. The site has gone from approx. 33,000 organic visitors in November 2018 to over 157,000 in November 2019.
Please note that this campaign was run alongside regular digital PR and content marketing campaigns (meaning the highest-quality links were also being earned to the site and consistent content improvements being applied, all of which no doubt contributed to the organic growth).
"FINDING INNOVATIVE AND UNIQUE WAYS TO OFFER MORE VALUE TO SEARCHERS ACROSS KEY PAGES TEMPLATES (SUCH AS PRODUCT PAGES) IS A SURE-FIRE WAY TO IMPROVE ORGANIC PERFORMANCE. IT IS ALSO WELL WITHIN GOOGLE’S GUIDELINES AND WHEN IMPLEMENTED CORRECTLY CAN RESULT IN SUBSTANTIAL INCREASES."
The results
