Manual population of products v Auto Population

[rodeboy]

Fresh Store Builder

Manual population of products V Auto Population of products.

Discuss, together with reasons for your preference!

 

[rodeboy]

Product Population

Thanks everyone for the healthy discussion here!!

For what it's worth I like the idea of auto-population in that it freshens the site up on a regular basis. You do have to check once in a while though to see that no random ones have crept in.

Would welcome anyone's thoughts!

Chris

 

[cc976a]

Edit - ignore me, didn't see this was relating to FSB. Never used it!

 

[cc976a]

Out of interest is everyone still finding good SERPs with you FSB sites?

 

[retired_member21]

Has anyone got some good ranking FSB sites wouldn't mind checking some out then may be able to comment / get into the 'FSB' revolution

 

[rodeboy]

FSB sites

Nick, have a look at Princess Games, Drum Sticks and Dress Up from my signature. I've also just launched Humpty Dumpty today. It needs one or two tweaks but is 98% there.

Chris

 

[careybaird]

On the original topic, I usually prefer to do manual population. That way you can pick exactly the products you want in your categories. It also means you get more familiar with the products and niche.

However it is more time consuming and you have to revisit your stores to add more products over time. I do this anyway freshening up content, but some people might want a more "autopilot" situation.

Also some niches you can do autopopulation no problem, whereas others may be disorganised on Amazon and therefore you would get a lot of junk in your stores.

 

[roydovaston]

On the original topic, I usually prefer to do manual population. That way you can pick exactly the products you want in your categories. It also means you get more familiar with the products and niche.

However it is more time consuming and you have to revisit your stores to add more products over time. I do this anyway freshening up content, but some people might want a more "autopilot" situation.

Also some niches you can do autopopulation no problem, whereas others may be disorganised on Amazon and therefore you would get a lot of junk in your stores.

I agree that auto is a good idea but when I did it for my fsb site I had all sorts of products that were not related. I ended up doing it manual which was time consuming but thorough.

To answer the off topic SERPS question - my experience has been negative. High entry positions that dropped in a week or so. Admittedly I haven't done any off site link building.

 

[rodeboy]

FSB sites

Having now set up several sites using FSB I agree that some subjects struggle with the auto-population, but others get it spot on! As a result I now set up auto-population, leave it for a week (before going live) and then re-visit to see how it is coping. I then maybe tweak the Search criteria, including Keywords and Filters, or switch to manual population if need.

Even within the same site one category may work fine, but then I need to manually populate another as it just doesn't work out for that one. So at the moment I am now doing both!

Picking up on Roy's point on SERPS I would be interested to hear Carey's response as I too have found that after initial, very quick, appearances on page 2 of Google the site then vanishes. We all know how temperamental Google can be, but this seems to be a feature of FSB sites.

 

[careybaird]

Having now set up several sites using FSB I agree that some subjects struggle with the auto-population, but others get it spot on! As a result I now set up auto-population, leave it for a week (before going live) and then re-visit to see how it is coping. I then maybe tweak the Search criteria, including Keywords and Filters, or switch to manual population if need.

Even within the same site one category may work fine, but then I need to manually populate another as it just doesn't work out for that one. So at the moment I am now doing both!

Also remember that you can use the "All Products" page in your admin area, which has a ton of filters and mass actions. So you can easily choose a category, filter the products by keyword/price etc. and then delete them all.

Picking up on Roy's point on SERPS I would be interested to hear Carey's response as I too have found that after initial, very quick, appearances on page 2 of Google the site then vanishes. We all know how temperamental Google can be, but this seems to be a feature of FSB sites.

Google and SEO is a topic that comes up a lot and I put a lot of information in a thread here on Acorn domains about things to do and check.

If you are getting a good initial ranking but then it disappears then it could be one of the following:

- Google finished ranking your entire site and didn't find enough unique content. You have to think about Ratio as well - if you have 3 pages of unique content but 1000 products with Amazon content then your unique content ratio is low. If you have 5 pages and 100 products then it is high.

- People are "bouncing". Check your bounce rate in Google Analytics. If people are visiting and leaving quickly, Google will realise that they are not finding what they want. To fix this make sure the users are finding what they want.

- Link Building pattern changed. If you got 100 inbound links in the first week and then 0 in the second week, it looks suspicious.

There are many other things to look at but have a read of the guides in your FSB account area. We have also just announced a solid new link building tool via email this week, that will help your rankings.

Good luck