Does Google love you?
Does your online store have all of it’s pages indexed in Google? How do you find out?
I have been looking for an while at Google’s indexing of one of my online stores, www.tacklemania.com.au. We have over 2,000 SKUs, and a few more pages that we have created for some simple SEO efforts, but only about 1,100 pages are in Google index.
This means we won’t be attracting the traffic that we should, as customers may be searching for some of our products in Google, and our product pages won’t even exist in the index!
How do you fix this? There are some easy solutions that can make a big difference…
The solution is effectively to make all of your content ‘visible’ to Googlebot and other search engine crawlers.
In the case of our store (a ChannelAdvisor store) there are lots of characters in URLs that spiders don’t like, including ‘&’, ‘?’ etc. This signals to search engine spiders that the page may be dynamic, and often subsequent pages are crawled at all, or ranked very low.
Check your site status in Google
First, you should check your site’s indexed status in Google.
At the Google search prompt, type “site:www.mysitename.com”. This will show you how many pages from that domain Google has in it’s index. Keep in mind this is an approximation, and may change slightly each time you run it but it should be a good indicator.
If it says you have 100 pages in the index, but your store has 500 products, you know you have some work to do!
Make a sitemap
A sitemap can help a search engine, or a user, find content they are looking for on your website.
Google has a webmaster section here : http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools where you can, as a website owner, submit a XML sitemap to Google which Google is supposed to use to help index your site.
To create a sitemap there are some free tools on the net. The one I tried is a web app here : http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp.
I generated a sitemap of my store, and exported is as a HTML file. I uploaded this HTML file and linked to it from my home page. As my online store is externally hosted, I don’t have access to ‘claim’ the site as my own using Google’s webmaster tools (and therefore submit an XML sitemap) so this HTML fileis the next best solution.
What I hope now is that Googlebot will see this new HTML page, and visit all of the URLs, ensuring all of my product pages are indexed.
Why don’t you check your site today, and see if you can be indexed a little better?
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Comments
Mike,
Thanks for the comment. I see 5,680 pages in Google’s index for you?
Unfortunately as CA store users we don’t have access to add pages etc to the site.
We use a method that is fairly common, we have two subdomains.
One runs the CA store (store.tacklemania.com.au), the other is a CMS system that we have running on http://www.tacklemania.com.au.
(You will notice the subdomain changes to www when linking to our site index page).
We upload the sitemap HTML file to our www sub domain, and link directly to it by editing the CA store template.
It is a bit clumsy, but the only option at the moment.
You also might have to break up that sitemap HTML file into multiple files as a single page for 20,000 SKUs would be huge and web spiders may not want to process a page that is megabytes in size!
Also, make sure you use all the other features that CA give you for SEO improvements (Meta tags, keywords, page titles for categories etc) to get the most nag for your bucK.
Cheers
Nathan,
First off , thanks for your time and help. Let me see if I got this straight.
My normal domain right now is http://www.onestopfanshop.com that does a CName redirect to stores.channeladvisor.com/onestopfanshop. I have another domain that is http://www.1stopfanshop.com that i forward to http://www.onestopfanshop.com. Are you saying to allow 1stopfanshop.com domain to become a host so I can upload my xml file and just keep it forwarding to http://www.onestopfanshop.com.
The reason I’m a touch confused is because I have subdomains like ebay.onestopfanshop.com that goes to my ebay site, but I can’t find where I can upload a file to that subdomain. If that is possible, I guess i can call my provider to find out where to upload. Just wanted to make sure I’m clear on what to do. I was able to verify my site with google by adding my meta tag to my store tile filed in CA, but that is a close as i can get because google is stating my XML file needs to be at http://www.onestopfanshop.com/helpme??.xml.
Thanks in advance for your help,
Mike
Nathan,
CA is stating that I can’t upload a file to my store. How did you upload this file to your CA store? Are you saying that you just have some disk space off-line and then you are linking from your homepage to the file?
When I log into my google account they are wanting the file in this format http://www.onestopfanshop.com/???.xml
Any help would be great. We have over 20,000 items and google is only showing 243 pages.
By the way, great post.
Mike