Changes and the Effect on Google Searches

[Caprice]

Hi All - 

Do we know how changing titles/tags affects Google search results, if at all?

[Windy]

I hope it does SOMETHING. I ran a test a few weeks ago, where I just went into several products and lifted a part of the description. Then I put quotes around those words which I took directly from the description and I did a Google Search. I did this for about fifteen products. Mine, other creators, popular items, items posted for sale years ago. 

Not a single one of these items I tested showed up in a Google search.

[Caprice]

So you mean AFTER you completely removed part of the description, those items no longer showed in a search?  Or are you saying that you tested the items with the text still there (tho you copied it for the search) - and they still didn't show in search? 🤔 

These are the kinds of nuanced topics I wish Z would do tutorials/Q&A for; it would make us, and THEM, more successful.

[Windy]

No no no. What I am doing here is using Google to determine whether our descriptions show up in a Google search. We are told by Zazzle we need to write really good descriptions and are told those descriptions  will not help inside of Zazzle, but will help our products come up in search. 

I want to know if I am wasting my time writing good descriptions. After all, After many years here, I find that a huge number of my products have been viewed, only once or twice, even though I have optimized my descriptions according to recommendations and forum advice. I have been here since 2005.

So I have been testing to see if products which have been posted on Zazzle for a long time are searchable when I lift language directly from the description. My finding is NO. This is true for my products and for the products of other designers too. 

I just searched one of your products that has been up since 2020 by pulling a string of words out of your description. This particular product does not come up in a google search when I do this. Can you make it work? @Caprice 

Funny I run this place white kitchen towel
by CapricePetit

[Caprice]

Nope.  Sorry to report...lifting verbiage from the description did not find the product in a google search.

[Windy]

I am starting to think about leaving the description blank in view of my findings regarding google search.

[randysgrandma]

@Windy I don't think you can leave it blank. If you try you get a notice that you have to fill it in before the product will publish. The being said, descriptions are so far down on the page I doubt anyone reads them anyway. People decide whether to order based on the item, theme of the design and whether they like the image or not. I doubt if anyone decides to purchase because they like or even read the description. I jut hope there are some kind of benefit from having a good thorough description. 

[Windy]

Yes, @randysgrandma 

You are right. You can't leave the description blank at all, so for a few minutes there I was just putting one word. Like POSTCARD so as not to waste my time. But then I realized I can copy and paste my own description later when I want to post the item on my blog or on my Pinterest. So there IS value in the description area, and the value (to me) is as a notepad.

[Wildart]

I've been keeping my description pretty brief for a while no with no discernable difference to sales, I came to the conclusion that the customer probably rarely reads it, and it's not that valuable. the only instance I have thought it might be helpful to customers is to mention filters to change colors, and for one item, directions on construction.

[Artsiren]

(Just found this thread from the past, while looking for something else; thought I'd chip in.)

How far back in time did you go in your store to try products? I literally just read your post, went to my original Zazzle store and picked a product from 2009. Grabbed the first sentence of the description, put it in quotes in Google, and there are only three results plus a bunch of image results.

In this case, the first image result is mine. And out of the 3 results, the top 2 are both my product, number 1 being the Zazzle UK link, and number 2 the Zazzle USA link.

EDIT: Tried another new product from January this year. That's there too. My product is the only result in the Google search. Weird you're not seeing yours.

[Windy]

Maybe Google is blacklisting my Zazzle!  I have just checked again....I do get one result, It's from my product posted on Pinterest, which I would have posted to Pinterest in the last couple years. No other result, no link directly to Zazzle. Product Age: Created on: 6/6/2005, 5:40 AM

Just tried another example. Google shows my product twice! Once on Zazzle UK and once on Zazzle CA. I  live in the US and post on the US site. So I think something might be super wrong somewhere.

**

[Baylee]

@Windy Don't give up on descriptions just yet..lol. I was curious after reading all this discussion so I tested some of my own products in Google search. The majority of them showed up using parts lifted from the description. I'm still not sure why a rare few didn't show up. I thought it might be related to which products have sold but that doesn't seem to be the case. I also checked the difference between one of my store ranked at 8 and another store with a Zrank of 4. There didn't seem to be any relationship, as products from both showed up in the search. I did note that products created in the last week or so weren't showing up yet. I couldn't narrow down the timeline much closer than that because I hadn't created anything new since early Feb. (and those items did show up in search)

One other important thing to note is that many third-party sellers use your description ..... something I was dimly aware of, but this knowledge was reinforced when I ran this test. Many products showed up from 3rd party sites.

[Windy]

You are right! I have always wondered why certain of my products keep selling, even if rarely. Now I see that some of these products are listed by third party sellers--so that's a really good reason to run the "description test" we have both done. It's nice to see where some of those third party sales are coming from.

[Baylee]

I know, right? And it's reassuring to see that all our description efforts aren't totally in vain 🙂. 

To get back the original topic of this thread, I'll have to try some title/tag tests to see what effect, if any, those type of changes make in the search results.

[Alissanos]

They may not be indexed in google, collections for example are not included in google, so other pages may not be either. If thats the case then you wont find them.

[Caprice]

So does anyone know if changing titles and tags (as opposed to description) affects where a product might 'rank' in google searches?

[Artsiren]

It *should* change your ranking, if you are changing the title to include a new keyword where there is less competition than the original title.

So using "dog" as your title will drop you into the pool with 8 billion+ other Google results, whereas "three legged beagle" pits you against 3200 results.

If you start adding the product into your searches on Google - because Zazzle adds those to your titles automatically - numbers shrink nicely.

So "dog t shirt" produces 3.2 million results. There are zero results for "three legged beagle t shirt" - but of course, you need to figure out whether people are looking for that, I guess. (In my case, I'd just make a handful of such designs and see if they sell!)

Don't know why I chose beagles by the way. Just popped into my head.

And so "beagle t shirt" gives 267,000 results, whereas "white beagle t shirt" gives just 8 results.

No idea how long it takes Google to re-crawl & re-index a page that has a new title. Worth watching the search results over time to see how fast it changes - and probably re-send social media links from Pinterest or wherever, to the newly re-titled page. Might help with Google re-indexing.

This is all kind of theoretical, though. But I can't see why Google wouldn't re-crawl a page with a new title that homes in on a longtail keyword that they don't have many results for; especially if Google's customers are searching for it and not getting any hits! But probably worth you doing some deliberate experiments to see how it changes things. I'd pick an old product that's never sold, and that gets hardly any (or no) traffic - rather than messing around with a bestseller and losing all your sales because Google thinks it's entirely different and the old search traffic dries up!!

[Alissanos]

I know this is an older thread but I am also curious, does anyone know if changing your title changes the url of the product?

A new products title becomes part of the url, if it does change the url when the title is changed then it would have to be reindexed in google and the old address will no longer bring you to your product, nor will affiliate links, unless there is some kind of redirect in place?

If it doesnt change the url then it would still affect your google rank as the title would no longer match the url.

As for tags, Im not sure how much of an impact it would have on google, it depends on how much weight they place on tags.

Can anyone confirm if the url changes? I havent tried it yet

[SeanaDG]

I was wondering this same thing about the titles. It doesn't seem that the title changes, at least when I checked a day or so after making a title change. Wondering if someone knows for sure and what impact that might have. Thanks!

[ElizabethR]

Google just introduced their AI writing app, Writesonic. I have been seeing headlines that they will be changing Google search to favor this new app. I will have to stop and read about it.

[chefcateringbiz]

Whether it does or doesn't work right now isn't the issue; it's WHEN it works - and eventually it will - your descriptions are already in place and you don't have to go through and update hundreds of descriptions because you wanted to be lazy when you created those products.