Slowly dissappearing in Google

[countryjoe]

Hi all, I read this forum pretty regulary and over the years have learned a lot about search engines etc.
Now I have a problem, I have a online shop selling small antiques, collectibles etc. Over the last couple of years due to fighting cancer (I won, so far) this has pretty much been maybe 75% of my income, problem now (recently)is my keywords / pages have pretty much vanished or dropped to page ???. For 2-3 years they were pretty much in the top 25 listings. A few are still hanging on and a few have dropped a little which I can handle. But this is starting to affect my income. My stats were showing maybe 800 visitors a day now down to about 300. I don't know if the problem is with Google's Big Daddy update or something I may have done with my pages. The shop is run through a ShopSite setup on Bizland. My index page was built by me a couple of years back and the links hook up to the ShopSite deal. Anyway any ideas or problems that need help?
I've increased my adwords bid to help counteract, but it raises the overhead.

A few keywords that have been dropped or moved to lower spots
vintage kitchenware, graniteware, advertising collectibles, antique kitchenware, glass candy containers, old razors, safety razors, oil cans.

Also those that show seem to go mostly to my index page not the shop pages. Could there be a problem with the ShopSite pages not being indexed?

Thanks for listening.
Country Joe
Country Joe's Collectible Stuff

[Webnauts]

Before going on analyzing in details your page, you have a lot of markup problems which must be fixed.

And by the the way, do you have a site map? It could be that your shop pages are not indexed in Google.

There are for sure more on-page problems I have seen, but lets go for them later. :)

[countryjoe]

The markup problems you are refering to are they on the shop pages? If so they would be in the ShopSite coding which I guess I can go in and fix them, not sure if that's possible. But I'll give it a go once I know what they are.
Yes, I have a sitemap http://countryjoe.bizland.com/site_map.html and also a Google Site Map.
Originally all my shop pages were hand coded by me but site got to big to continue that way so I transfered over to using a ShopSite Pro setup with my host several months ago. All was well until the last few weeks when I noticed visitors dropping and started looking into it.
Thanks, Country Joe

[davebarnes]

Janis,

Google has only indexed 207 pages of your website. Some in the last 30 days and some not since January 2006.

Yahoo has indexed almost 1400 pages but gives you a page rank of zero.

I went to buy an item and saw that you don't take credit cards.

I think you have two tasks:
1. Increasing traffic to your site with SEO.
2. Improving the site's ability to suck money of visitors' wallets.

,dave

[countryjoe]

Hi Dave, we do take credit cards, paypal, check, money orders etc.
On shopping cart page there is a drop down menu Select payment type:
for Visa,Mastercard,Discover,PayPal etc.

[davidredwine]

You have a couple of endemic problems.
One- your home page doesn't have high enough relevance for any one thing......you are all over the map with all kinds of stuff (from a SEO standpoint)..

Truthfully almost all of your stuff is antique, vintage, 1950's etc. and you don't capitalize on that with "alt" tags. You should take the table of items on the front page and create Alt tags describing more about that category. As an example in your "jewelry "pins" category, you could alt tag the "Costume Jewelry" hyperlink with "Antique jewelry - pins from circa 1950 and other years".....the key here is to repeat the phrase "antique jewelry" because there are thousands of surfers looking for stuff using that phrase. Stick with the big traffic phrases "Antique collectibles" "antique Jewelry" and such. go use the www.wordtracker.com tool to see what phrases will give you the best bang, then sprinkle more of these single keywords (like antique and collectible) into the alt tags of each hyperlink. that way the search engine will key off the repetition (for the pop-up alt tags), there will be an increase your SEO ranking for "relevance", but it wont look silly to your customers.

Your second problem is your payment method screams "mom and pop" fly by night business. For goodness sake, go to authorize.net or someone and get an ecommerce account. Paypal is a dying payment method, 99% of people hate Paypal, if your site doesn't take visa and mastercard, you might as well get ready to shut it down.......

I would get rid of all the following text on your front page, as it is not necessary and prevents your visitors from immediately being able to "go shopping"

---------------

If your a collector, hoarder, pack rat or a compulsive buyer of neat collectibles,
odd and unique items, your in the right place. Dealers, we can deal.

Sorry no high end antiques, just affordable collectibles and other stuff.
Plus FREE SHIPPING to U.S.A. addresses (most items).

Don't forget our Souvenirs and Glassware pages.


Pour yourself a coffee or soda, grab a snack, relax and wander around the shop.
You never know what might show up hidden in the corners.

If you don't see what your looking for please use our shop search feature,
as many items fit into multiple catagories. Or please email we may have it.
-------------------------

For the following text, which is all pertinent and useful, this text is to large, uses up too much "blank space" and should be squeezed higher on the page (and made smaller text) to allow the table with the shopping items to be visible the instant a visitor arrives.

-------------

Advertising Collectibles * Kitchen Collectibles
Welcome to Country Joe's Collectible Stuff !
Vintage collectibles and a few antiques for sale!
* A VERY ECLECTIC ACCUMULATION OF COLLECTIBLE ITEMS*



Dealers of small antiques and collectibles of all types. From advertising blotters to Zippo lighters. Many odd and unique items. Also advertising collectibles & tins, medicine tins, glassware, china, antique kitchen and country items, dollhouse furniture, miniatures, jewelry, sterling silver, silverplate, paper and a little kitsch thrown in, plus much more.


---------------------------

Go into your subpages and add the "power terms" to your keywords on those subpages like "antique toys", antique jewelry, etc, and add alt tag references to each image that repeats these key "power keywords" for that category of items. To find your power keywords, enter the "general category" or description of the items on that page into www.wordtracker.com and see what people are typing into search engines when looking for those types of items, then USE THOSE in your alt tags, sprinkle a few everywhere you can in the description of items on applicable pages, and MAKE SURE you keywords are a little fatter in that they make more use of those "power phrases"

-good luck-

[countryjoe]

Hi Dave, I appricate your ideas and will look into some changes, but what is going on is very recent last 30 days maybe. Index page has been pretty much as it is for a couple of years, some changing of words etc. Recent items and that type of stuff which was getting picked up and crawled every few days by Google, the new items were showing up in a couple of days and normally on the first page of Google when searched by their name.
All major credit cards are accepted. Lottsa merch has been sold over the last couple of years, so I don't believe the index page is the problem.
Everything seemed to come apart in last few weeks.
Will look into cutting down a bit on unneccessary stuff on the page but need to leave related words on there somewhere. I know I cover a lot of ground with my merchandise but that is the type of business it is. Can't optumize for 2 or 3 keywords. Again this is a new problem
Thanks, Country Joe

[davebarnes]

Janis,

I selected an item to buy.
Was sent to this page: http://shopsite.bizland.com/ss8.0/sc...alware-01.html

I don't see credit cards as a payment option. If I were a real buyer, I would instantly leave your website.

,dave

[KCWill]

Hi Dave,

I know this is probably a very basic question, but since I don't know the answer, I wanted to ask.

How can you tell how many pages have been indexed, by the different search engines, and when they were indexed? Thanks.

--Will

Lovers Adult Trends, for lovers and friends...

Originally Posted by davebarnes

Janis,

Google has only indexed 207 pages of your website. Some in the last 30 days and some not since January 2006.

Yahoo has indexed almost 1400 pages but gives you a page rank of zero.

I went to buy an item and saw that you don't take credit cards.

I think you have two tasks:
1. Increasing traffic to your site with SEO.
2. Improving the site's ability to suck money of visitors' wallets.

,dave

[dartman]

Be careful what you do with reworking your pages. We tinkered with our main page and tried to work in some of the latest seo tips we found here and other places and wound up going from page 1 to page 4 in the serp. Regardless of that, we like our layout and content with respect to shopper info and appeal so we plan to leave things as is for now and hopefully G will catch up to us.

Keep in mind that the economy has changed recently with the price of fuel escalating to new heights so shoppers will have less disposal income to spend on impulse purchases such as antiques. In the billiards business shopping generally tapers off between April and Sept so there may be some sort of seasonality impact for your business as well. Besides, its gettin summer and I'd guess more folks are going "out" to antique shops, flea markets and the like if they are shopping.

[countryjoe]

Dave right below the total on that page is a drop down menu
"Select payment type: Visa" and opens to
Visa
MasterCard
Discover
American Express
Check
Money Order
PayPal

Paymrnts are not a problem, placement on Google pages is the problem.

Thanks, Country Joe

[countryjoe]

Hi Rick,
I understand the gas prices and the flea market garage sale, hang out in the pool thing. 35 years of doing the markets. We don't have our auctions June-July -August because of that.
I also know that things slow down over the summer.
But they have nothing to do with Google placement
and pages dropping.

[khurramali]

Originally Posted by KCWill

Hi Dave,

I know this is probably a very basic question, but since I don't know the answer, I wanted to ask.

How can you tell how many pages have been indexed, by the different search engines, and when they were indexed? Thanks.

--Will

site: Indexed pages in your site

allinurl: Pages that refer to your site's URL

link: Pages that link to your site

cache: The current cache of your site

info: Information we have about your site

related: Pages that are similar to your site

procedure is to use like this site:www.arfy.net

[countryjoe]

Okay I did some digging around and noticed that when the script for google-analytics was insterted in the main product pages it somehow ended up in the middle of the meta description tag which made that tag sorta gibberish and I presume unreadable by google bots. Also fixed some Doc statements and added robots follow tags to the pages.
I believe Google looks at the description tags and they they have some bearing on rankings.
Maybe this will help some.
See ya, Country Joe

[MtraX]

Hi Joe

There's some funny code showing up at the top of your home page...

Regards
MtraX

[SPC2]

countryjoe.

"markup problems" won't affect anything with the search engines, unless the problems are actually broken code, in which case it may have an effect, but not necessarily.

For a little while now, Google has been dropping many pages from many sites from the regular index, and that may be what's happening to your site. If you know how many pages were in the index before the problems started, compare that figure with the number of pages that are there now.

If your pages are being dropped from the index, it could be because the site has too many reciprocal links as compared with one-way IBLs, or the site may contain some OBLs that Google now doesn't care for. The Big Daddy update was largely about Google's crawling and indexing functions, and they appear to have new parameters for determining how much a site is crawled, and how many of its pages can be in the index. A read of Matt Cutts' blog post might be beneficial.

[scanmonkey]

Here is a nice little tool to check how many pages are in the index by data ceneter

http://www.linkadage.com/linkadage-i...cs_checker.htm

[scanmonkey]

I would look to augment my SEO efforts with offline marketing. Pass out "business cards" with your url at flea markets or shows, put a classified ad with your url in the penny press, or place a classified ad in a collectible/antique publication with your url.

[incrediblehelp]

Is their a way you can find out through your analytics tool which pages exactly have dropped in traffic (dropped in rankings) in the past few weeks?

This is important to understand. Simply stating help me my traffic/rankings have dropped is to open ended. Dig deeper and find out exactly what pages are dropping.

Maybe your competition is just doing more than you right now to achieve rankings. Simply leaving stuff alone and not making your website better and better each and every month doesn't work and your competition will eventually beat you.

Like you have mentioned when the recent introduction of Big Daddy, Google has removed many previously high ranking pages for different reason. Some think they are working to get duplicated pages out of the main index, remove spam, etc.

One thing I have noticed is the pages they have removed tend to be deeper in a website, usually product pages. These pages usually ranked well for long tail based keywords.

[dartman]

Originally Posted by scanmonkey

Here is a nice little tool to check how many pages are in the index by data ceneter

http://www.linkadage.com/linkadage-i...cs_checker.htm

Interesting tool. 2 questions -

a. Can you explain the "Deep Link %"
b. Why is there somewhat different results from the different G data centers?

Thanks.

[gogetter34]

countryjoe- that's awesome to hear that you are winning the cancer fight! It can be real frustrating when you were in the top 25 for the past couple of years and are slowing disappearing. First, have you consistently been marketing your site? Maybe you can update the site with some more, concentrated keywords that you are still using. Have you been collecting the email addresses from your customers and keeping in touch with them at last 4 times a year? Are you using other marketing methods besides google? There is so much marketing you can do today to get your rank back up.
[Edited by Mod Webnauts: Affiliate links are not allowed at WPW. Redirect have been identified. Please update your signature. See Forums Guidelines]

[countryjoe]

Hi, The way it stands now is I'm in remission as far as the cancer goes. One battle won, now on to the website battle.
I've done a bunch of digging around my sites etc. and noticed that about 6 months or more ago when I moved the shop over to a ShopSite setup with my host
(at that time I was in and out of the hospital) I had added some meta refresh tags to my old shop pages to forward customers to the new pages and forgot about them. Took those old pages off.
I have been adding merch which should be updating page content fairly regularly plus rewriting bits and pieces of my main page and rewriting page descriptions. Of course some pages don't change to much due to not adding items to them. But sometimes I wiil go in and change wording on the products. I am light on incoming links, but hard to find related links that aren't competitors who of course don't want to link to me. Can't blame them. Have looked around and don't see any bad links coming in. I also noticed that individual product pages which would be about 3 levels in are pretty much vanished or have pretty old cache dates. Spent some time cleaning up codes when I see mistakes. Guess that's about it for now. Also I guess I need to get working on a little newsletter type email to send to past customers. Had thought of this in the past but medical stuff kept getting in the way of things. Hopefully now that is in the past.
Thanks, Country Joe

[scanmonkey]

dartman,

deep links are links to an interior page

the data centers are in flux and contain different builds

[dartman]

Originally Posted by scanmonkey

deep links are links to an interior page

Thanks (I knew that).
In terms of that tool you suggested it gave a figure for Deep Link %.

Would this mean the % of interior pages that are indexed?

[countryjoe]

Hi, another quick couple of questions, in your opinion what do think the average searchers set their Google preferences to 10, 20, 30 results per page?
Also after how many results would you consider being invisible. I know the first page is where to be, but we all can't fit, what would you say is acceptable top 30 results?

Same goes for Google adwords top 30 - 40 results?

Had this under control until G went wacky, so need to approch from a different angle I guess.

Thanks, Country Joe

[scanmonkey]

Dartman,

Correct!

Country Joe,

I believe that most searchers leave it on the default 10 results. From what I have read 65% of searchers do not go past the first page. Considering all the additional ads that approx 20 choices from some queries.

That why its important to use a tool like wordtracker to identify "long tail searches"
http://www.nichebot.com/wt/

[countryjoe]

Ok I'm back again, had a few other things to take care of and now back to the website. I went through and set up 301 Redirects from my old shop pages, deleted old pages from my hosts servers and did a little cleaning up of my html and cleaned up the page content some. Resetup my Google sitemaps etc. Have noticed a slight ranking rise for some keywords but notice only my main page is actually showing in serps. And many keywords that ranked high before are no shows. The next layer of pages which has the items for sale are not showing. If I search for a specific item it only shows if it's written on the first page. Single and main product pages only show when I use the site:countryjoe.bizland.com or site:countryjoescollectiblestuff.com searches. The interior pages show then but all are "supplemental" and many are old pages.
This doesn't help a buyer find what they are searching for. Hopefully these second level pages will surface soon cause it sure ain't helping sales.
Adwords is helping but also costing.
See ya, Country Joe

[countryjoe]

Well I figured out why I'm not making many sales,
did a site;countryjoe.bizland.com search on Google and came up with 2290 pages, 2260 are supplemental.
Also many of the non-sup pages are from my postcard shop or are old pages. That sure ain't good.