According to a discussion that took place during the Organic Listings Forum here at Search Engine Strategies Chicago, Google has issues with product specific pages on shopping sites.

The Organic Listings forum was moderated by Danny Sullivan. The panelists were Mike Grehan, Mark Rosenberg, and Erica Schmidt.

During the Q&A part of the forum someone took the mic and asked about problems his company, Shoplocal.com, was having with product pages that were only good and relevant for a short period of time. This wasn’t so much a question as it was a revelation in one of Google’s struggles to bring timely and relevant information when it comes to search strings related to direct products.

Basically, ShopLocal.com will compare product sales on a local level. For example, if you’re looking for an ipod in Chicago, the site might give you the latest deal from both Best Buy and Circuit City. The problem is, once the deal ends the page remains online and the search engines continue indexing it as if the content never changed.

The keywords Danny Sullivan used to bring up a page on Shoplocal are “chicago ipod”. Sure enough, a shoplocal page came up as the #1 result. But, this page is no longer relevant or useful because the product on sale is no longer on sale and has vanished from the page.

One can certainly argue that chicago ipod is a healthy search term. In fact, I’ve searched for similar keywords myself. So, wouldn’t Google want the user to find timely and relevant information in the #1 spot on the SERP? I mean, I usually get peeved when I click on a result only to find that “this product is no longer available” or “this page has moved”.

Why then does Google continue to rank product pages on shopping sites so high when it is so obvious the content fluctuates? And for the record, this particular product page had changed quite some time ago. Google had plenty of time to re-evaluate the pages’ relevance.

What up with that?

Today I had the pleasure of attending the SES Chicago “Organic Track” forum, “Sitemaps: Oversold, Misused or On The Money?“.

The panel was moderated by Danny Sullivan, Editor-In-Chief for SearchEngineLand.com. The participants included Amanda Watlington, Vivek Pathak, Jeremy Clem, Manager, Natural Search, and Trevor Foucher of Google.

During the Q&A section of the forum, someone in the audience asked an off topic question about flash websites and flash files. The question was asked along the lines of “when will Google start doing a better job of indexing flash content?”

You get the point…

Anyway, Danny Sullivan chimed in right off the bat and said matter of fact “it will NEVER happen”. Sullivan went on to say that flash files are extremely unfriendly to search engines, something most of us already knew but loved to hear re-enforced, and that anyone using them was clearly heading in the wrong direction.

When Sullivan went to pull the forum back on topic, Trevor Foucher of Google jumped in with “plus, a lot of users can’t see flash, so we feel it isn’t user friendly either”. Which says to me that Google doesn’t like flash and will likely look down on it when it comes to grading a pages’ content for the SERP’s.

Can we put this to rest once and for all?

Enough with the flash hysteria.

-Eric Odom