This video from Google’s Lead Web Spam Engineer, Matt Cutts, literally quashes ecommerce as we know it. Make sure you watch this video which states Google’s view of ecommerce sites and be prepared to give up trying to get organic placement for ecommerce enterprises that are reselling products.
Watching this video from Matt Cutts is incredibly concerning and illustrates a HUGE change from Google in regards to how stores can and will be placing and thus selling on Google.com.
Here’s the hard truth from the video:
1. If you are not selling your own unique products, but rather selling someone else’s products as an affiliate or reseller, you must have unique product content on your pages and invest in differentiating yourself from other competing sites as Google will no longer allow you organic placement on Google.com. Matt Cutts clearly states the harsh reality in this video – as an issue for Google in regards to search quality.
2. If you do set up a store borrowing product content from your manufacturer you should expect to only be able to bring in sales and traffic from an investment on Google AdWords. Paying for SEO services to assist your site in improving organic placement will be money wasted if you have not addressed the most important consideration for your site’s ranking which Cutts says is the issue of duplicate content.
3. Matt states that if you don’t have the time or where with all to create unique content for your products, that you should not be posting them and selling on the Web.
With nearly all ecommerce stores picking up cookie cutter content on products this is a very huge hit from Google in regards to how store can and should sell on the Web. Will this impact stores like Amazon and big box stores like Best Buy? Certainly, but the greater impact will be on small enterprises that have made a good living from selling on the Web and have just recently seen their organic placement drop from the Google Panda update.
As I watched the video, I grew increasingly concerned that these new revelations would have serious and long term impact in regards to how small business owners will sell and promote their products on the Web. I see this as a very strong shift to move businesses into paying to play on Google by forcing businesses to get visibility using Google AdWords. As I provide AdWords services this is not necessarily a bad thing for my business, but a very strong indicator and warning to the SEO industry that Google is changing their business model significantly.