Can product pages be created to rank in search engines for inventory from a local store?

Question

My website integrates with the inventory of local stores. A store could have hundreds or thousands of products.

I'm considering having a product page for each inventory item, given that it is specific to locale and a specific store. The product descriptions can sometimes be quite terse however (sometimes only 1 or 2 words), while others can be quite descriptive.

From my SEO research, it seems that product pages without a lot of unique content can be considered spammy by search engines. I don't want to be spammy, but for products with more specific descriptions, it could be very helpful for customers to be able to find a product page from a specific store in their locale.

Is this a practice that will cause trouble with search engines?

Answer 1

Since you're just launching, be safe in regards to SEO. If you get hit by Panda, it's a very deep hole to crawl out of, so avoid that ;)

For these pages you're considering, separate the utility for human visitors from the utility for search engines.

If the pages help a visitor find a specific product offered by a specific local retailer, then they serve a valuable purpose to your visitors, and to your business, so by all means create the pages.

However, since you don't have the ability to build unique, valuable content for each of these pages, they will likely be viewed by Panda as "low quality".

So create the pages, populate them with the data you have available, and add a meta robots "noindex, follow" to the pages. It will the pages from harming you re: Panda, but still allow your human visitors to get value from them.

Answer 2

For the experience I had writing titles and descriptions, I would say you are looking for titles of around 70 Characters and descriptions of around 300.

In my case I had them in multiple languages and made an effort to always have at least more than 250 chars on the description, and things went good.

Funny thing is that one of my competitors started to outrank me with only titles and no descriptions, his difference was that he was publishing a lot more content than me. To have an idea I was publishing between 15 and 25 small articles per day and he was doubling that.

Bottom line is that in the long run, he started to fade and I kept the top positions for the keywords that mattered the most.

My advice in your case is to make an effort to have a complete product page with at least a title, categories and some tags if you can't have a description. Other products with descriptions will compensate the lack of useful text in the others and everything will be fine.