I have a question- I'm not really expecting to find the answer straight away as I guess the problem could be caused by any number of factors. What I'm hoping is that I could get some ideas of what the possible causes are, which I can then take to our developer to discuss and test out
The site in question is www.savapoint.com. The issue is that although the site ranks for a search on it's domain name, Savapoint or savapoint.com, it does not seem to get results for ANY of the products it sells. The site is about 5 years old, based in the UK and used to rank well for product searches up until at least 6 months ago, possibly until more recently. I have not been responsible for the SEO side of things so haven't really been keeping an eye on when product results stopped showing up.
The site is developed with PHP. Although the URL has question marks etc, it never used to be a problem so I don't think that's the issue.
Any ideas as to why our products would not be showing up?
run "site : www . savapoint . com" in Google - it shows only 4 pages (and the rest are considered to be "omitted results")... This might be the point you're looking for.
Hi Steve, looking over your website I see several possible reasons why your product detail pages may not be showing up. There are so many factors you know.
One question why does the homepage jump to a folder ?
v7moron, I'm probably being really stupid here but what are the possible reasons the rest of the results are ommited?
Webfu, I've been battling with the tech guys to change the site structure for quite some time but they recon it can't be changed without causing major disruption. The site was initially created by someone that did not have much idea about SEO. We have (unwisely in hind site) set up various other loyalty sites on the same domain, example, http://savapoint.com/supanet.
The initial thought behind this setup was to bring in additional traffic to the savapoint domain. What should have been done was to set up the savapoint main site on the top level, not a folder.
it can't be changed without causing major disruption
- it can. Make redirects. Google will not penalize you for that!
The results might be supplemental because most of your pages have the same title. I don't really know what other reasons might be, but maybe you find your answer in this article.
It's said there
Quote:
but as deeper you nest pages in your website, the lesser their importance for Google.
I think that folder issue might be a one of the causes.
From where I see it the site has no PR. Yet the problem is not the PR, but the huge ammount of supplemental results. That site needs to make something to get its pages indexed into the Google main results. The site needs ready-to-buy visitors. And the visitors are not able to find it. The page rank is irrelevant in this case.
Yeah, the page rank is slowly climbing again, we were dropped from 5 to zero a year ago and have now climbed back to 5 through a bit of hard work and also changing our redirects to 301.
I still can't see any real reason that our products aren't appearing in the main results though. Our page titles are unique to each product so should not result in them being classed as supplemental I don't think
Just been chatting to someone else, it appears that our site is dropping the cookie as the visitor enters the site. This is apparently a problem for the spiders. What we should be doing is dropping the cookie only when the user gets to the cart. This way the spider has a full chance to crawl the product pages.
I was analyzing your site and have noticed that the pages that are listed in google under supplemental results DO have the same title.
for example: http://www.savapoint.com/savapoint/sitemap.html http://www.savapoint.com/savapoint/s...eckcookies=yes etc. But I see you've made some changes and google doesn't show any of your pages in the supplemental results anymore. Yet, it hadn't indexed almost anything relevant.
I haven't noticed that cookie, but yes, it is a problem. WebFu also gave you the idea how to solve the index problem. You should also try to fix the errors in your code - some might stop the bots from reading your pages correctly. And when you are done with that, submit your sitemaps to google. Visit sitemaps.org to get the correct protocol - that works for google, yahoo and msn.
Add some internal keyword links from your home page and from other pages dropping the session ids. Also, try to get some more deep keyword links to pages again dropping the session ids.
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We're making a few of the suggested changes, I'd like to do them one at a time though to see what the main reason for this problem was. It will take some time to see the effects of the alterations. I'll keep you updated after each major change and let you know what happens.
You should be fine by just adding more direct product or category links from yourmain index pages... Your sitemap looks great so just keep plugging away.
Keep on building links and try and scatter them to your category pages as well - this should create a trickle down effect.
I have a question- I'm not really expecting to find the answer straight away as I guess the problem could be caused by any number of factors. What I'm hoping is that I could get some ideas of what the possible causes are, which I can then take to our developer to discuss and test out
The site in question is www.savapoint.com. The issue is that although the site ranks for a search on it's domain name, Savapoint or savapoint.com, it does not seem to get results for ANY of the products it sells. The site is about 5 years old, based in the UK and used to rank well for product searches up until at least 6 months ago, possibly until more recently. I have not been responsible for the SEO side of things so haven't really been keeping an eye on when product results stopped showing up.
The site is developed with PHP. Although the URL has question marks etc, it never used to be a problem so I don't think that's the issue.
Any ideas as to why our products would not be showing up?
Steve
Because, IMO, your website is more on computer sales, if I am not mistaken, and I think you may have lots of competitors, especially on your keyword. So continue off-page optimization by building quality links from high PR/traffic sites.
Just a quick update guys - we initially had our cookies set to drop as soon as someone landed on our home page. What we discovered was that the spiders could not see our pages because all they saw was a bit of text saying "Oops, your browser does not support cookies" so had no links to follow.
We have now changed this so that the cookie drops only when something is added to the basket. Our site is now being spidered again and our products will slowly appear in the search results. This was a very expensive lesson to learn around Christmas time but now that we know we'll keep on doing other SEO to boost the rankings of each product page.
Thanks for your help, hope you have a successful year ahead
Wow - that really is a great lesson - I am glad you figured that out - I am also grateful to know that this sort of issue could arise. I have been programming for a little while now and this seems to something easily overlooked. Dynamic sites and spiders are like peanut butter and women - both are good but they don't play well together. ( sorry - I just watched Talladega Knights).
Yet the problem is not the PR, but the huge ammount of supplemental results. That site needs to make something to get its pages indexed into the Google main results. The site needs ready-to-buy visitors. And the visitors are not able to find it. The page rank is irrelevant in this case.
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