Aug
8
AbleCommerce has been helping entrepreneurs with their shopping cart needs longer than any anyone, so we’ve seen a lot of changes and fads over the last 18 years. We know by now that you don’t always jump on the latest bandwagon just because others are doing so. The latest trend in ecommerce is what merchants and software vendors call a “multi-store” feature – the ability to sell your products on different websites. For merchants marketing the same products over multiple domains, you should be aware that this type of multi-store solution is in direct violation of Google’s site content policy.
There are software vendors that recommend multi-store to all merchants, big and small, even though the vast majority of merchants would actually realize a net loss in profits with a multi-store approach. Now that multi-store has been out awhile, it’s easy to find merchants that jumped into the water early, and now are jumping out as they realize the facts of this folly. We’ll be separating fact from fiction in our latest blog posts and explain why multi-store could be a benefit to you, or a major pitfall.
Considerable time and energy is spent on the topic of search engine optimization – and for good reason. It’s often the best investment a merchant can make to improve their bottom line. Unfortunately, SEO is at the heart of the single biggest issue multi-store’s face – duplicate content.
Google is at war with the content farms. The duplicate content that these farms create reduces the quality of Google’s search results and makes it hard for users to find relevant information. Content farms scan the web for unprotected content and publish it to relevant domains in an attempt to collect advertising revenues when users unsuspectingly click through to these useless sites.
You may think you’re safe by creating different themed sites, but the Google experts use advanced algorithms to weed out duplicate content. Even when framed inside unique websites, Google will check the IP address to see if it’s coming from the same server. Google also checks the domain records to see if the content is coming from the same owner. There are many other tricks they use, and so much more that we cannot imagine in their never ending quest to provide relevant results.
Publishing your products using multi-store ecommerce software falls into all of the pitfalls mentioned above. If all websites are running on the same server, and the product content is duplicated, it’s very easy for Google to figure out if it’s all coming from the same company. Per Google’s Webmaster guidelines, it’s quite specific – “Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.”
“Back links” are another issue that is given the same amount of marketing effort as SEO. Long ago, Google incorporated the idea of back links into their ever changing and secretive ranking methodology. Back links, under the logical premise, means that the more people linking to a page will be a distinct measure of its importance. For multi-store merchants, are you willing to double or triple your marketing budget in order to build multiple niche websites, in the hopes of gaining incremental business? Most, if not all, merchants would be better off spending their time and effort building back links on one website rather than many. Quite simply, in Google terms, 333 back links for 3 websites does not even come close to ranking as high as 999 back links for 1 website. We rarely see even the largest merchants diluting their brands in such ways. Doesn’t that tell you something?
Fresh content is King in the land of Google results. This is substantially the same issue as back links. Unless you are going to double or triple your content writing staff, you’ll end up rationing out your fresh content between multiple websites, and overall reducing your competitiveness with other merchants that are more focused with their efforts.
The idea of publishing blocks of your products onto other domains with the goal of gaining incremental business might sound attractive, but given the SEO pitfalls, it’s rather disingenuous of these other platforms to be pushing a “multi-store” feature to merchants.
To be continued next week, in part 2 of this blog, so make sure to sign-up for our blog! We’ll be addressing software stability, ease of customization, server performance, and outline a few scenarios where multi-store would be a benefit.
