Why E-commerce SEO Disputes Are Different
E-commerce sites are often large, complex, and highly dependent on organic search to drive sales. A single change to how products, categories, or filters are handled can significantly affect revenue. As a result, disputes involving online retailers frequently focus on SEO performance and the effects of specific technical or strategic decisions.
Bill’s expert witness work in this area helps courts understand whether observed traffic and revenue changes are consistent with the alleged SEO actions.
Category and Product Page Visibility
Category and product pages are the backbone of most e-commerce SEO strategies. Disputes may involve loss of rankings for key category terms, shifts in how filters and facets are indexed, or changes to product templates that affect relevance signals.
Bill examines how the site structured categories, subcategories, and product detail pages before and after major changes. He looks for evidence of content consolidation, URL changes, canonical tags, and internal linking adjustments that could explain ranking movement.
Platform and Theme Migrations
Retailers often move between platforms such as Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, or custom solutions. These migrations are high-risk events for SEO. Traffic loss following a migration can become the focus of disputes between retailers and vendors.
Bill evaluates redirect implementation, URL mapping, templating changes, structured data differences, and any shifts in content or metadata. He then connects these changes to analytics and search console trends to assess the likely causes of traffic loss.
Duplicate Content and Faceted Navigation
E-commerce sites frequently create many combinations of URLs due to filters, sorting options, and faceted navigation. Without proper controls, this can lead to duplicate content problems and dilute rankings.
In contested matters, Bill reviews how the site handled parameterized URLs, canonical tags, noindex directives, and internal links. The goal is to determine whether the chosen approach was reasonable and how it affected indexing and performance.
Structured Data and Rich Results
Structured data can unlock additional search features like rich snippets, product ratings, and price displays. Changes to structured data—either adding it or removing it—can influence click-through rates, which may impact sales.
When structured data is part of a dispute, Bill analyzes how it was implemented, whether it met search engine guidelines, and how search result appearance changed over time.
Attribution, Analytics, and Revenue Impact
E-commerce disputes often blend SEO questions with broader analytics and attribution issues. For example, a drop in organic traffic might coincide with changes in paid search, email campaigns, or site UX testing.
Bill examines how analytics were configured, whether tracking changes occurred