Programmatic internal search pages - Wayfair

For a long time, Wayfair was really good at showing up in search results because of their programmatic internal search pages...but now, they're down by 75%.

Wayfair used a clever SEO trick where they let their search pages be shown in search results. This meant that even if they didn’t create a specific page, enough people searching for something could make a page appear on its own. Because of this, they ended up with over 500,000 of these pages.

For years, this worked really well. In 2019, they were getting about 8 million visits to these pages every month. They were dominating the online search results.

But recently, I’ve been seeing fewer and fewer of these pages. It looks like they’ve been slowly disappearing over the last five years, especially when big Google updates happened.

Here are a few reasons why this strategy isn’t working as well anymore:

Average Page Quality: While most of the products on these pages were right, about 20% of them were often wrong. For example, you might see "white cabinets" on a page meant for "black cabinets."

Stronger Competition: Other online stores started making better, more specific pages. These higher-quality pages did better than Wayfair's auto-generated ones.

Helpful Content Updates: Some of the drops in Wayfair's pages match with Google’s Helpful Content Updates. These updates probably gave less attention to these auto-generated pages.

For a long time, this was an interesting example of how SEO worked in online shopping. It shows how things have changed over the past five years.

0 comments