Reevoo and Distilled publish essential post-Panda/Farmer SEO best practices for online retailers

Harnessing social media the key to “quality, unique content”

London, UK – June 2nd 2011 – Europe’s largest social commerce company Reevoo and its SEO partner Distilled have published a whitepaper outlining the SEO best practices that must now be the highest priority for online retailers in the aftermath of Google’s Panda/Farmer algorithm update.

Panda/Farmer is widely reported as negatively impacting the search ranking results of several prominent online retailers. The whitepaper provides all existing online retailers with executable SEO tactics that enable them to mitigate the effects of the February 2011 algorithm update, and provides invaluable advice for any retailer starting from scratch and intending to design a site that will work well in the new world of search.

One of the effects of Panda/Farmer is to filter out websites that appear not to produce their own content, choosing instead to copy content from somewhere else and republish it. This is a contentious issue for online retailers which, with thousands of products, often resort to publishing either stock manufacturers’ descriptions of products, or content that other retailers are also likely to access and put online. Google also increasingly appears to reward websites that appear genuine and trustworthy to the user.

Will Critchlow, founder of Distilled, says: “The importance of quality, unique content has always been apparent in the SEO industry; indeed, when asked to advise webmasters on what SEO tactics they should employ, the answer from Google typically includes the words ‘quality, unique content’. Getting quality, unique content onto individual product pages has always been a problem for e-commerce websites, and Panda exacerbates the difficulties.”

Richard Anson, CEO of Reevoo, continues: “The problem isn’t one of knowing what to write, it’s more one of scaling the content across thousands of products. While a good e-commerce team can write about the products they sell, writing enough content to cover a growing inventory of products isn’t likely to be the best use of their time.

“It’s also hard to imagine that a team could write infinitely without resorting to stereotypical descriptions. And it ignores the fact that worldly-wise and savvy consumers need to be persuaded by people – not the retailer itself – that what they see and read is accurate and trustworthy,” he says.

Distilled and Reevoo have collaborated to combine the best in search expertise with Europe’s finest social commerce thinking. Through examples and case studies, the resulting whitepaper explains exactly how product reviews and other user-generated content can bring a variety of SEO benefits to retailers and manufacturers – and turn Google’s Panda update into a friend rather than an enemy.

It outlines the opportunities and best practices for improving product and category pages, targeting additional long-tail keywords and gaining more exposure in the search results.

The Distilled/Reevoo whitepaper – entitled ‘User Generated Content for SEO’ – is freely available to download from http://www.reevoo.com/b2b/user-generated-content-for-seo-ebook-2/.