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?