SEO-Google Issues with my Site vs. Etsy Shop?

[SylviaAnderson]

Hi everyone,
I am really clueless about how the SEO thing works as far as Google seeing my website and my Etsy shop listings. Will Google not direct traffic to my site because I have the same listings in both places? Do I need to completely change the titles and descriptions so that both can be found, or should I not even worry about it? To confuse things even further, I also have an Artfire shop....I am thinking maybe I should just let that one go if it's also creating a problem with Google searches. I am confused and just don't know if I need to be worried or not, and/or make some changes. I have been getting about 1 order on my site every 4-6 weeks, but that is much less than I typically get here on Etsy. When I look at my Etsy shop stats, most of my traffic is internal through my listings, and Etsy search....not so much from Google. Thanks for any help you can offer...I am just confused! :)

[Former_Member]

You don't have to worry about duplicate titles because Google doesn't care about that. It's always a good idea to vary them a bit between the shops though because then you have more chances to be found in more searches.

Their duplicate content issues comes into play with descriptions. If google decides that 2 items duplicate each other too closely it will only display one of them so you'll need to change the descriptions significantly enough that google sees them as completely different things. If you have the same item in 3 shops they'd each have to be very different for all 3 to have a chance at a good ranking.

Most people a very hard time with this but as long as one of your shops/items ranks fairly well I wouldn't panic too much if the other identical items in your other shops don't. Chance are you'll be seeing your Etsy versions first for quite a while because they're a much more established site than our individual ones are and there are countless backlinks to etsy all over the internet.

I can point you at a really good SEO team if you have the time to learn more about it in detail but I can help you with basics here.

[SylviaAnderson]

Thanks Karen. I'll be sure to go in and change the descriptions then. Is there something I should be doing with my SupaDupa site to make sure that it's being seen on search engines? I went through my checklist 100% when I set my site up, and dont remember anything really about doing something for SEO stuff.

[Former_Member]

No, you don't need to do anything in particular. You can submit your site to google and that might speed up the first crawl but as far as I can tell we don't get crawled anywhere near as often as we do on Etsy. You can also hook it up to google analytics just like you can here and see your stats in detail. It can all be a bit overwhelming when you're just getting started and we face so much big competition out there. Your work is beautiful BTW :)

[GraceEarrings]

hi Sylvia
in a nutshell:

same title & tags = ok

same descriptions =/= ok

its that ' duplicate content thing ' ....... the duplicated ones are not really filtered out....but google will put the duplicated ones on page 999999.

re-writing each description is time consuming but it can be done
just do a couple listings each day

my SD listings all show up in google.
good luck

[SylviaAnderson]

Thanks so much for your help Karen, and Grace! Really apprieciate it. :) And thanks for the nice comment on my work Karen.

One last question....I read through the thread about listing pieces on our SD site, and that it we put the same item on the front page, and then into a second category that google will see that as a duplicate listing and it may not get seen like it should in a google search. Is there a work around or fix for this yet? Has anyone talked to the folks at SD to see if there is something that can be done or that we should do?