Discount Halloween Costumes

[jackson992]

Hi all:

The past month has been horrible for me in Google. I am only getting 400 visitors a day, down from 2000. Can anyone tell me why I am not ranking well for discount halloween costumes? I am ranked on msn #1 but google I can't fine me.

[DMC_34]

Whats the URL?

DMC

[jackson992]

duh! Must be getting early in the morning LOL

http://jacksretail.com

[DMC_34]

First thing I noticed is you have some duplicate content issues.

site:jacksretail.com - 458,000 - 458,000 Is that right?
site:www.jacksretail.com - 1480 results

You have both instances of "www." and just domain name. You should choose one and 301 redirect the other.


Secondly,

I am not sure about this but it seems Google is going after what they refer to "thin" affiliates. From what I saw, but I didnt look through all your pages, everything is an affiliate link. By "thin" they mean if your site offers very little to the visitor except to send them to another site. I do not have an affiliate site so I am not sure. I am sure some other members here have better knowledge of this than I do. Some affiliates are considered ok such as www.christmasgifts.com but they offer free music downloads, screensavers, etc. I would try adding something of value to your visitors or more unique content.


I would fix the URL problem first and if that doesnt help then you might consider the second suggestion.

DMC

[jackson992]

Hi all:

On that first point I actually did have it redirected but was told that search engines frowned on the redirects? So I deleted the redirect lol . I don't see how that could be considered duplicate content tho as www and nonwww page is the same. I believe the only reason to use only one is because of PR?

As to your second type, this isn't a content site it is a sales site. More specifically it is a price comparison site. I don't see bad listings for Bizrate, Shopping.com etc and these are also price comparison sites. All my sites are this format and they do rank well on msn and yahoo just not google. I've also noticed that on several pages the adsense ads are way off topic.

[newsblaze]

You have dozens of minor problems, but that's all it takes to get a poor listing. For example, your title has duplication, your keywords have a spelling error. Your page has insufficient text. Your links all says discount something. Your page isn't about costumes, its about discount. You don't have a heading. Need to decide what it is you want to rank well for. Your pages are all phps.

Yu have too few link partners, meaning nobody thinks your site is important. Most of your link parners are garbage sites. Choose wisely - you haven't so far. Sorry to be so blunt, but you are in trouble and you need to fix it quickly because your big time is coming up.

You have no chance or ranking well with your current setup - you need to do some work.

Go to business strategy and download the free ebook at the top right side that tells you why you aren't ranking well and what to do about it.

Alan.

[jackson992]

Ummm do you know what SEO is? That's the whole point of duplication. You always repeat your keyphrase in your title tag as well as numerous times on the page. Of course there isn't much text, this is a sales site not a content site. I want people to click off to set the cookie. The nav links all say discount to rank well for discount categories. However the page itself is clearly about costumes. The title reflects this, the metas, and the content of the page are all costumes. Not sure why you're not seeing a heading as I see one that says Buy Halloween Costumes. Not sure what you mean to infer on the php comment as this has no bearing on the ranking of a page, Google indexes php fine.

The link partners you are prolly seeing are the ones that add you to their sites with no permission. I get these scraper sites all the time linking to me. There are a few legitimate sites of course, largely my ten other sites plus others who have similar sales sites.

[wsmeyer]

this isn't a content site it is a sales site. More specifically it is a price comparison site. I don't see bad listings for Bizrate, Shopping.com etc and these are also price comparison sites.

Are you kidding? You're seriously trying pass your sites off as "shopping comaprison" sites?

Your sites are nothing more than directory sites. A collection of largely unrelated links to other sites.

This is my favorite one: shopping-to-go(dot)com

25 categories of products each containing exactly 6 links to other websites selling some random product.

Electronics are surely popular on the net, in your "electronics" category my six choices are...

1. 3V lithium watch batteries
2. six outlet surge protector
3. Dimage Z3 digital camera (no brand mentioned)
4. EX-Z40 EXILIM Digital Camera (again, no brand mentioned)
5. Martin DCXE X Series Cutaway with Electronics
6. Studio Electronics C2s Dual Stereo Compressor / Limiter

This is just one category, the others are equally as pathetic.

Do you seriously think this provides value to the internet? What are the odds that someone stumbling upon your site will actually be looking for one of those 6 products?

Sites like yours are just clogging up the search results with useless junk. This is why the search engines are taking active steps to remove it from their indexes.

Now that I am done ranting, let's go back to your Halloween costumes. If you want it to be successfull you need to provide some value. Since you don't actually sell anything, the only thing you can really provide is information, just like shopping.com, bizrate, or the other price comparison sites do. This means you are going to have to do the legwork of finding all the coolest costumes available for purchase on the web - lots of them. If someone is trying to buy a cartoon costume for their kid, there should be at least 20 different ones to choose from. They need to have better descriptions than "Adult Corpse Bride Costume Costume" (*see below for more*), and if you really want to do it right, add customer reviews for both the costume itself AND the retailer selling it.

** When selling on the internet there are two rules to follow:
1. Write a description that would sell the product WITHOUT pictures.
2. Provide enough pictures that the product would sell WITHOUT a description.

William.

[jackson992]

William:

Our visitors find us by searching for a specific product name. Furthermore, these are just featured product pages. As far as clogging up the search engines, I disagree. I see loads of useless content sites out there but provide no real value. If I want to read something I will go read a book, plus the fact that shoppers aren't looking to read they are looking to buy. The merchant is where they read the product description. Adding it to my site would just be duplicate content. Note that my homepage is only featured products. The links I have added today lead to specific categories such as costume accessories. Noone also has touched on the fact why I rank #1 in MSN and so much farther in Google. If I look at bizrate for example, I see no information besides the price of the product, image and wher I can buy it. This is what I am trying to achieve on my site as well.

[jackson992]

Hi Allen:

I forgot to tell you that I did take a read through of your book. In fact I signed up for that link place and got a link already. One thing I am curoius about is what happenes when you have a homepage like mine where the topic changes depending on the season. For instance, right now it is featuring cotumes, after Halloween it will be featuring Christmas.

I'm still at a loss where you're seeing the bad people I'm linking to. Could you tell me what page you were seeing this on?

Lastly I saw on your book that it says to make the title short. Several places I seem to see long titles so is this something that has changed recently?

[brian.mark]

Ok, so let's clear a little bit of this post up.

Originally Posted by jackson992

On that first point I actually did have it redirected but was told that search engines frowned on the redirects? So I deleted the redirect lol . I don't see how that could be considered duplicate content tho as www and nonwww page is the same. I believe the only reason to use only one is because of PR?

302 redirects are frowned upon. 301 (permanent) redirects are looked upon favorably. The statement about not seeing how it could be considered duplicate because it is the same page - that's the definition of duplicate : same page, different URL.

Originally Posted by jackson992

As to your second type, this isn't a content site it is a sales site. More specifically it is a price comparison site. I don't see bad listings for Bizrate, Shopping.com etc and these are also price comparison sites. All my sites are this format and they do rank well on msn and yahoo just not google. I've also noticed that on several pages the adsense ads are way off topic.

Originally Posted by jackson992

If I look at bizrate for example, I see no information besides the price of the product, image and wher I can buy it.

Bizrate.com has some great content. Here is what they do for individual product information. They have reviews of products as well as buying guides. A shopping comparision site should be set up so you can get all the information you need to buy a product, not just something to get people off of the site as quickly as possible. That doesn't give them reason to return or talk about the experience they had while shopping on the site (also known as naturally occurring links). They want information and advice, so they go to a shopping comparision site.

When I get to your site, I don't have the opportunity to compare. I just get a bunch of items only at one store each, with no comparison going on. I don't even get a list of costume categories, it's just all thrown in front of me in various sizes so they don't line up properly.

It looks like all you care about is "discount ____" as keywords. Discount Halloween Costumes, as an example, has 1.5 million results. By only having one page, you're only targeting one term that has lots of competition. If there is an algo shift, you could lose everything in one swoop. If you break your content for any category out into multiple pages, you'll be able to catch more terms and have less chance of everything going at once.

Consider adding in "last minute halloween costumes" for those late shoppers. How about "unique halloween costumes" or "scary halloween costumes" or even "funny halloween costumes". Expanding the keywords you target (a unique page for each, please) will start getting you more visibility since you don't have all your eggs in one basket then.

Also, I'd recommend that you talk about the items some. Why are you showing me these particular costumes? Have you found some great costumes that I'm sure to love? Are these the most popular costumes for this season? Are these some that all of the neighbors won't have? This is all going to add more words, which will in turn allow you to use your phrases a bit more, which will in turn help your SEO efforts and provide you with better traffic.

Once a visitor is to your site, then we can worry about making it pretty. The header area is pretty cluttered with search boxes, ads, logos, and a bookmark link that gets pretty buried. None of it seems to go with the site, so it all gets lost to banner blindness. Take a look at this site. It's very clean, very quick to load, and has a ton of useful pages broken down into some nifty categories. Some of those categories could be made into keywords for your site as well, but you're going to need to show more than just 15 costumes for it to really be useful.

On a final note, a page for each costume (or product) is going to let you target that particular costume much better. You said earlier that people find you by searching for a product. Well, show them that product when they land there. If what they want is that 15th costume, they may not find it. If they land on a page about that 15th costume, they have no choice but to find it. It doesn't need to be duplicated from the merchant... write a quick blurb about "Kids love SpongeBob, and this year the SpongeBob FrankenBob costume is sure to delight them. We've located these for you already at Buy Costumes, so quit searching and buy yours today!" That is a call to action. Give them a link and you've got unique content with the product name as keywords several times. Add a heading of the product name above it, put an image beside it, give it a quick look and post it. That'll get more of the visitors you do get moving on through the process. The way it is now, it doesn't even tell them why the next click takes them to a new site, so they may get confused and give up.

Make it for the users and the search engines will eventually figure out what you're doing and reward you for your efforts.

Brian.

[jackson992]

Hi Brian:

If I add copy like that can I just make the copy the same with just changing the keywords? This is all being done via datafeeds so I need to be able to make a page fit for multiple products if that makes sense lol.

P.s.

I can't get to that costume site for some reason. Are you not getting a 404?

[brian.mark]

Best practice would be make them unique. I can understand why you don't want to invest the time and effort, but it is sometimes a necessary evil when you want to really rank well and start making a lot of sales. I'm working on my own shopping comparison engine, and i feel your pain. It is indeed a lot of work, but it has so much potential gain if things are done right. I'm still in the process of creating a huge rewrite of the common categories that shopping sites all seem to think things belong in, so it'll be some time before I have it all sorted out yet and ready for public viewing, but I'll let you know when I have something you can see.

As for the site listed before, I just clicked on the link I posted earlier and it came up just fine. No 404's, 500's, or any other error codes have been seen here.

Brian.

[jackson992]

hmmmm I'm getting an error code 400.

I started doing some of the things you suggested last night. Take a look and let me know what you think

[brian.mark]

I'd say you're starting to go down the right track. The huge number of costumes makes it sort of overwhelming to start looking through. I didn't know you had that many last time I saw the site.

The header area looks much better. Much cleaner and much better organized.

The link for "View our Halloween Costumes categories" was sort of hidden. I missed it the first time, made my way to the bottom of the page, and got overwhelmed with the 468 pages of costumes. Can you leave those off of the homepage and put the link to the categories there again? It doesn't seem real useful to the visitor to have that many "numbers" listed on the page. Categories would help out a lot more than numbers when trying to locate a costume.

I really think you're starting to get the hang of this. You're getting some content, but now you need to work on those pages for SEO.

On this page:

http://jacksretail.com/test-links.ph...%2FInfant+Boys

Title of "BOYS: Baby/Infant Boys"

description of "Buy BOYS: Baby/Infant Boys from Jack's Retail. Purchase BOYS: Baby/Infant Boys today!"

Keywords of "BOYS: Baby/Infant Boys"

This really makes it sound like you're selling boys. There is no mention of boys costumes. I mean "Buy BOYS: Baby/Infant Boys" really sounds bad. You need to get the word costumes worked in there somewhere.

It'd probably be very useful if you broke the categories into categories and sub-categories. If you could make accessories, boys costumes, decor and props, etc. as some main categories, then put the groups of accessories, boys, etc. under those categories. Fewer options per page is generally better so your visitors don't get overwhelmed.

I really like the changes you've made so far. Keep it up and you should have happy visitors and happy search results as well.

Brian.

[jackson992]

Thx Brian. I think I am going to have to do things by hand for now. Really makes it easier adding categories too. I'm also doing hand descriptions now. Course I only have 6 costumes up so far lol