Fresh Eyes Needed

[garbageaccount]

I have 2 weeks to get this site to convert...it's been up since November and I've been working on this since December when I started the site was of course sand boxed and almost a duplicate of another site.

http://www.magazine-supermarket.com

There are a lot of factors that make it difficult to work with this site.

1. It is basically a skinsite of http://www.bluedolphin-magazines.com set up with OS/Commerce.

2. Product content and text cannot be differentiated from the other site.

3. The meta-tags can only be differentiated on the home page level, not on the product or category level.

4. The site had an affiliate program for a few months but that ended 3 weeks ago and therefor linking looks like it has come down significantly.

5. I've placed the site in shopping engines, Bizrate, Froogle, and Sortprice. Nothing happening there yet.

6. We do not want to compete with ourselves so the site will not do any paid placement on Google or Overture.

7. There is linking that was done in February now being recognized by the search engines, and another set of linking was done in late April.

So any help anyone can give with a fresh pair of eyes concerning what I may be able to do with this site that is only being marketed by SEO!

Any questions don't hesitate to email me - search@magazine-supermarket.com

[brian.mark]

Basically, you're saying that you have a site you can't make many changes to that you want ranking in the search engines? If you can't make things unique, then how are you going to get it to rank? I just don't see it being possible.

If you could say what changes you CAN make rather than everything you can't, maybe we could help more.

Brian.

[garbageaccount]

I have the tech guys looking at ways we can make more changes to the site, but I'm still unsure how they can work.

Basically the meta-tags for the product pages and the actual products and categories are unchangeable. So is the text attached to those peices.

We CAN add extra text to the pages. We can add some further choices to the pages.

But I'm wondering if just fundamentally the skinsite concept of using the same database to drive 2 web sites is actually a good concept or not.

[cspelts]

Originally Posted by bldlphn01

The meta-tags can only be differentiated on the home page level, not on the product or category level.

Question - do you have the ability to alter the code on product_info.php and add a couple of fields to your database?

Your product page is currently pulling the title, description, and keywords from the database. So if in your database you created a field called title2, and you kept the data type exactly like your current title field, but then you went through and wrote a new title for each entry, and you updated product_info.php to grab the title from the title2 field, then you would have a unique title for that page. Same thing for the description and keywords.

If you can't change that table in your database for whatever reason - for example, if you download your data from another source - you still might be able to *add* a table with this new info, and then link the two and write a query.

[cspelts]

We posted at the same time!

Originally Posted by bldlphn01

But I'm wondering if just fundamentally the skinsite concept of using the same database to drive 2 web sites is actually a good concept or not.

The only way I would think it could be a good idea is if you designed it so that some of the fields appeared only on one site, and other fields appeared only on the other site. Your main fields could appear on both sites, but you need some content that doesn't overlap.

[garbageaccount]

CSPELTS Wrote:

If you can't change that table in your database for whatever reason - for example, if you download your data from another source - you still might be able to *add* a table with this new info, and then link the two and write a query.

I'm going to ask the tech guys if this is possible.

Thanks

[garbageaccount]

Well I think the affiliate program shut down finally hit Google. We are now back in the sandbox :(