Another interesting tidbit from Marie Haynes interview of John Mueller was a snippet around how people place text on the bottom of e-commerce category pages. John kind of suggested that 90% of that content is unnecessary but it is useful to have a sentence or two.
Here is the transcript:
Marie Haynes at 32:16: "So rather than having that SEO text at the end of an e-commerce page, do you have recommendations? I mean there are some obvious things that users would want but are there certain things that would be helpful in terms of what Google would want to see on an e-commerce page that you can share with us?"
John Mueller at 32:35: It's hard to say. The one thing that I notice in talking with the mobile indexing folks is that when the e-commerce category pages don’t have any other content at all other than links to the products then it's really hard for us to rank those pages. So I'm not saying all of that text at the bottom of your page is bad but maybe 90%, 95% of that text is unnecessary but some amount of text is useful to have on a page so that we can understand what this page is about. And at that point you are probably with the amount of text that a user will probably be able to read as well, be able to understand as well. So that's kind of where I would head in that regard. The other thing where I could imagine that our algorithms sometimes get confused is when they have a list of products on top and essentially a giant article on the bottom when our algorithms have to figure out the intent of this page. Is this something that is meant for commercial intent or is this an informational page? What is kind of the primary reason for this page to exist and I could imagine that our algorithms sometimes get confused by this big chunk of text where’d we say oh, this is an informational page about shoes but I can tell that users are trying to buy shoes so I wouldn't send them to this informational page.
This kind of implies that maybe we are overdoing it with the amount of content we are placing on our e-commerce category pages. We can do without 90% of that content and it would be a better situation for both Google and our users.
Have nay of you noticed this or tested this?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
More from John:
Or perhaps that's too much sarcasm :).
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) June 10, 2020
Make content for your users, obviously, if you want to be recommended by those users!
