Community Outcry Triggers SEO Change at Etsy
June 18, 2009 | By
Earlier this week we reported that Etsy’s community had begun to voice concern about recent changes to the sites title generation and its overall effect on individual shops' SEO efforts.
Etsy had changed every item page’s title from <Etsy: item name…….> to <Handmade (Category) on Etsy: Item Name…>, the net result of this change was an overall decrease in search traffic going to individual sellers. Many in the Etsy community criticized the site for “branding” individual artist work as “Etsy”.
Etsy’s forum community rallied around calls for cancelling this SEO change and repeated threads requesting Etsy Admins to address the community concerns and explain the reasoning and thought process behind why such a drastic shift in policy were launched. Forum topics in response to the changes were wide spread with topics such as: “1 to 2 Weeks is Not Acceptable –NOW!! Is good!” which was started on June 14, receiving well in excess of 2,500 responses.
The calls for fixing the SEO issue were eventually effective. On June 18th at 1PM EST the Etsy Staff made another SEO update to notify the community that its concerns had been heard and that changes to the way titles are generated had been made to allow every item’s title to be first in the title tag for each product page. This change goes beyond simply going back to the way things were (Etsy used to start every title with “Etsy:….” ) and is likely to allow Etsy sellers to enjoy the same level of search engine traffic experienced by Etsy’s competitors, who have been using the “Item First” title naming convention for some time.
Traffic from search engines will likely pick up again in 2-4 weeks once the search engine spiders pick up the majority of these name changes (search engines do not track these changes automatically and will need time to crawl all of Etsy’s seller’s items). In the meantime, the Etsy community has proven that, if united, it can force the large venue to adapt to the demands of sellers.
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