Google Dance
The mystery of google and how to optomise content for SEO in general continues.
Other than this one I have a few sites I look after that generate income for various people. I myself run an adult toys and novelties store and Dan (other Dan!) a good freind of mine runs an army surplus and boys toys site, we have employed and SEO company for a couple of years now to promote and market the surplusstore site to search engines and all was going well. Dan was on average getting 900 to 1000 hits per day and about 10 - 15 sales per day on the website. the website is well built (by me!) and easily outstrips the competition in terms of looks, usability and features. (one day when i have a few days to spare I will make the site accessable propperly) . about a year ago the trafic dropped on the site and dan now gets on average 500 - 6000 hits per day, a drop of between 30 - 50 percent ! obiously the sales have dropped in proportion to this. we have been through the mill with the SEO company and I have spent countless hours rebuilding pages and re jigging content and site structures as they have requested me to, all of this seems to have had little or no affect on the traffic comming to the site.
The SEO company have been comming up with ideas and trying new things for 6 months now with no success and we are realy comming to the end of the line with them. the point of contact at the SEO company has been baning on about how we are the biggest site on the internet for our market and how we have 32,100 pages in googles index. Hang on I thought to myself, that doesnt sound right !? I had a look and google did indeed have 32,100 pages from our site in its index. I then sat down and figured out that we actualy have about 1,134 pages on the website, a long way off the 32,100 that google knows about.
I quickly figured out that one possible explanation for the problem was the way that the shopping cart handles sessions, I recoded parts of the site to stop spiders from creating sessions and forced any session id’s to be stored in cookies rather than getting apended to the URL (this only happened in some realy bizarre conditions)
google comes round to us on a daily basis and im not sure how often they update there index theese days but I hope that after christmas we should see some better rankings for the surplusstore website, the number of pages in the index has started to drop already…
Fingers crossed for a prosperous new year !