Eight Ways To Prove To Google You’re A ‘True Merchant’

Didit Editorial

12 years ago

March 14, 2013: The big news from SXSW was of great interest to etailers: First of all Google’s latest Panda Update will roll out very shortly. In addition, Google is further tweaking its anti-spam algorithm to further prune the ranks of “unreliable” ecommerce sites. Over time Google has been working to create an algorithmic way of determining merchant quality. This all started because of a 2010 investigative report in the New York Times recounting — in lurid detail — the success of a shady Brooklyn sunglass merchant that leveraged negative business reviews to gain additional traffic and business for his fly-by-night operation.

Are there steps you can take to show Google that you’re an upstanding etailer, not a fly-by-night? There sure are. Here are the “signals” that Google looks for when attempting to judge whether a site is a “true merchant”:

1. An active Shopping Cart that updates when a user adds items to it, and a “view your shopping cart” link that persists across the site as shoppers browse it.

2. A Return Policy with an active physical address.

3. A functioning Shipping Charge Calculator.

4. A “Wish List” link or a link that let a user postpone a purchase until a later time.

5. A functioning Gift Registry.

6. A User Forum with active conversations.

7. A way for users to log in and/or register.

8. A way for users to track Federal Express orders.

Google notes that a site “does not need to have all of these features to be considered a true merchant,” acknowledging that “some true smaller merchants take users to another site to complete the transaction because they use a third party.”

Read complete article at MediaPost.com: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/195781/eight-ways-to-prove-to-google-youre-a-true-merch.html#ixzz2NXbPakY7