Case study Furniture and design eCommerce

[shaownhasan]

This online shop for furniture and design products had started to lose organic traffic following the Panda Update in 2012 (which is also now integrated into Google's Core Update).


A careful analysis of the site with the Site Audit , in particular the low features of our advertising database text/HTML ratio , revealed that one of the main problems of the site was the existence of many pages with little content or entirely composed of html templates.


Text/html ratio analyzed by SEMrush Site Audit
Text/html ratio analyzed by SEMrush Site Audit

Ecommerce site with a thin content problem
Example of pages with insufficient text
Added to this problem was the lack of canonicalization of product search filters (e.g. the existence of many brand+category pages with very few products listed which gave rise to many similar pages) without canonical rel or blocking indexing with noindex meta in the headers.

There was also heavy over-optimization in the title tags and headings of the main category pages (which also lacked descriptive text), and the " redirect chains " report had detected numerous redirect loops.

The site managers worked first by solving a good part of the technical problems and then by populating the category pages with a single text and since the beginning of 2018 (but the trend had already started with the Quality Updates of 2017) the site has started to grow again, recovering a good part of the lost traffic.