ecommerce - The Internet Marketing Driver

Wirecutter dropped heavily in search visibility over the past four months – Was it a reviews update, Google’s ‘Starkly different’ algorithm, or was vertical expertise rewarded?

October 18, 2025August 18, 2025 Glenn Gabe

Update 4: October 18, 2025Well, it sure seems that the robots.txt change that Wirecutter implemented on September 6, 2025 is working. Search visibility has been steadily increasing since then and is almost back to where they were in July 2025. I’ll keep an eye on this and see how things progress over time. But for … Read more

Google’s December 2021 Product Reviews Update – Analysis and Findings Based On An Extended And Volatile Holiday Rollout

May 2, 2022December 21, 2021 Glenn Gabe

Update: May 2022I just published a post covering a number of findings from the March 2022 Product Reviews Update (the latest PRU to roll out). My analysis covers linking to multiple sellers, the use of video content, loopholes in the PRU, intent shifts, dueling machine learning algorithms, and more. —– The past month has really … Read more

The short and long-term ranking impact of removing long and fluff e-commerce category descriptions [Case Study]

March 9, 2022August 30, 2021 Glenn Gabe

Imagine the following scenario… Excited about buying a new house, you decide to browse for a new kitchen table. So you fire up Google and start searching. You end up clicking through a search listing to view modern kitchen tables and land on the category page of an e-commerce site. But before you start to … Read more

Trapped In Google’s New Video Carousels – A Dangerous SERP Feature For Some Ecommerce Retailers [Case Study]

August 27, 2018July 17, 2018 Glenn Gabe

{Update 8/13/18: I started noticing a number of ecommerce retailers being released from video carousels when their category or product pages didn’t contain any video (or if the video just supported the main content on the page). The first signs of the change were on Sunday, 8/12/18 and I’m seeing the changes roll out more … Read more

How To Properly Set Up Pagination With Sorting Parameters Using Rel Next/Prev And Rel Canonical [SEO Tutorial]

October 8, 2021March 30, 2017 Glenn Gabe

Last Updated: October 2021 Update – October 2021Google just published new help documentation containing best practices for e-commerce sites, which included a section about pagination. In that section, Google explains that for category pagination, it recommends having each paginated url indexable and that each contains a self-referencing canonical tag. Google also emphasizes to not canonicalize … Read more

Facebook Ads for eCommerce – How To Combine Custom Audiences, Lookalikes, and Unpublished Posts to Target Customers and Similar Users

August 12, 2013 Glenn Gabe

I used to be extremely critical of Facebook Ads in the past. But that’s before Facebook released a boatload of functionality for enhancing your campaigns. Sure, marketplace ads, or ads running the right sidebar, have seen declining engagement over the years, but that’s just a fraction of what you can do now with Facebook Ads. … Read more

How To Find Keywords Triggering Product Listing Ads Using AdWords and Google Analytics [Includes a Custom Report for PLA’s]

October 16, 2012 Glenn Gabe

If you’re an ecommerce retailer, then you have probably heard of Product Listing Ads in Google AdWords. Product Listing Ads (PLA’s) are powerful ad units that enable you to display image thumbnails in the search results for products you sell on your site. As you can imagine, the visual nature of the ads yield more … Read more