Announcement

**Bruce - PhosphorMedia** · 07-24-09, 03:23 PM

Re: Miva seo-friendly links and Google indexing

You should do 301 redirects, however, you many not have to use hundreds if you can pattern match the redirects. For example, if all your new links have /product/product_code.html, you can pattern match the merchant url, taking its Product_code value and using it to replace the product_code.html portion of the new url.

Afterwards, I would encourage you to use a google.xml site map to expediate the indexing of the site. We have a module (Merchant Moogle) that creates and submits this file with a simple click or two in the module's admin.

**aarcmedia** · 07-24-09, 05:31 PM

Re: Miva seo-friendly links and Google indexing

If you didn't 301 redirect ALL of the product URL's via the method Bruce mentioned above, that's likely one of your problems.

I also see that you have a lot of left column navigational links. Part of the problem with the way you have it set up is the search engines have to scan through your Global Header and the Left Column before it ever sees any product data on the 1st & 2nd level category pages.

THIS HURTS your products ability to rank because SE bots tend to have a limit to how many links they count on a page. Furthermore, the farther down that list a link appears, the less weight it is given. Most think you should have NO MORE than 100 links on a given page. Anymore than that, and they either just don't get hit/counted AND/OR it dilutes the amount of page rank you pass to them from the page their linked on.

Another BIG problem is that each individual product has 3 separate links on each category page. Your product image, your "click for price or to purchase" link, and the product name link. You should really consider AT LEAST combining the image link with the click for price or to purchase link into one anchor link, but we typically recommend only including 1 link to each product on a category page through combining the thumbnail link with the text link.

This is an issue because by the time the SE bot gets tho your first product, it has already counted 85+ links on your main level category pages, so you have to figure the links into your products are passing barely any link juice. This is why so many of your products have no PR or are having a hard time getting picked up by the SERPS.

And even worse, the product links that appear AFTER the bot hits 100 don't get counted at all, and in some cases this can cause some serious indexing issues, which it sounds like you may be having a bit of also.

Hope this helps. We've been doing a series of SEO tips for Miva Merchant store owners on our blog for the last 2 weeks, and you've inspired me to do one about fixing site navigations. It used to be common to include a ton of left column links on every page, but now its becoming a bad idea because of the increased focus on link flow and the passing of link juice from your home page, to 1st level categories, and from categories into products. The search engines want to see a more organized and relevant flow to your navigation, and including EVERY category link in the global header or left column really screws you.

A GOOD QUICK FIX, would be to put the rel="nofollow" tag on pages you don't want indexed like Login, Shopping Cart Checkout, Your Logo (you only need one link back to your home page followed, not two). It may only negate 4 links, but every little bit helps.

Hope this helps.

**harmonicalessons** · 07-24-09, 08:42 PM

Re: Miva seo-friendly links and Google indexing

Bruce,

I do get the 301s, but at this point I'm copying and pasting Rewrite code into the .htaccess file without fully understanding it. I had thought that the Rewrite code I added a few months back covered the URL changes and was essentially a more sophisticated version of a 301. Here's what resides in my .htaccess file:
=======================================

AddType text/x-server-parsed-html shtml html htm

IndexIgnore *

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^harmonicastore\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.harmonicastore.com/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*index\.html?\ HTTP/ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.html?$ http://www.harmonicastore.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^harmonicastore\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.harmonicastore.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

### Begin - Inserted by Miva Merchant

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^mm5/admin.mvc? - [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-s
RewriteRule ^product/([^/.]+).html$ /mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_code=$1 [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-s
RewriteRule ^category/([^/.]+).html$ /mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Category_code=$1 [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-s
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/.]+).html$ /mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Category_code=$1&Product_ code=$2 [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-s
RewriteRule ^([^/.]+).html$ /mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=$1 [L]

### End - Inserted by Miva Merchant

==========================================

Would I still need the 301s in addition? If so, does this look correct:

Redirect 301 /mm5/merchant.mvc?Store_code=HS&Screen=PROD&Product_Cod e=* http://www.harmonicastore.com/product/*.html

I'm not sure if I used the wildcard characters correctly.
================================================

I'll take a look this weekend at your xml sitemap module. Is this going to be more effective than the default Miva sitemap I'm currently using?

Thanks again,
Dave

**aarcmedia** · 07-25-09, 04:15 AM

Re: Miva seo-friendly links and Google indexing

Yeah, you'll need the 301 redirect on top of that. You had copied 2 older URL's above, but they both just go to Miva's version of a "Page cannot be found" page. Are those actual former URL's? If so, those both should be redirected to the new locations, and not just dead links.

ALSO note that a Google sitemap isn't going to help the product pages that aren't getting picked up rank. The sitemap will help them get indexed, but to get them to rank, you'll have to address some of the issues I mentioned above.

You're doing everything else right. You've got a lot of inbound links pointed at the home page and some pointing at category pages, and you've got a decent PR. Your problem is that you're just not passing any of that strength to your product pages due top that huge left column nav.

Granted your industry is less than competitive, so in the end, if you can get the product pages indexed, you may be ok, but if you want to dominate the rankings across the board, you should either tone that down by listing main cats on the home page and subcats off of their parent cat pages, or even moving it to a right column instead might help.

Just friendly advice. I'm sure the store does very well, which causes many to think they don't need advice, but if you made sure it was 100% optimized instead of only 80%, think about how much more traffic you'd be getting on the daily.

**harmonicalessons** · 07-25-09, 04:14 PM

Re: Miva seo-friendly links and Google indexing

Ted,

After the helpful posts from you and Bruce yesterday, I spent about 5-6 hours last night researching on Google and previous Miva forum posts about the redirects and now more importantly, your points on total link number per page and "nofollow" as it relates to SEO (I also went back and watched a few Matt Cutts videos on the topic and related topics).

A Brief History:
I've had harmonica websites since 1997 and have mostly dominated the search results with as many harmonica-related keywords as you could think of... until recently. I rested on my laurels and the last few years of not paying attention to changes in SEO, I've slipped down the page rankings a bit. (But, I still come in at the very top when you google "buy harmonica" or "harmonica store".)

Addressing the Value of Adding Redirects (at this point):
It's been about 4 months since I made all the SEO friendly changes and if it's true what Pete McNamara said in a couple of previous posts ("...my experience is that it can take six months before your new pages rank as well as the old pages"), then in 2 months, I should be fine without adding any changes to my .htaccess file. I can wait because the vast majority of my sales come from direct links from my other harmonica websites. (And, the majority of my income does not come from my harmonica store.)

TED: "The search engines want to see a more organized and relevant flow to your navigation, and including EVERY category link in the global header or left column really screws you."
The search engines may not like it, but my users like the fact that much of the category/page links are found in the left column. I've learned this from talking to actual users and from a recent site poll. 3 out of 4 of visitors to my lessons website preferred "All Topics Listed in Left Column" to "Drop Down Menus (from header)". That said, I do agree that I can close down some of the sub-categories lower down the page at HarmonicaStore that don't end up creating much in the way of sales. This lower the total number of links before reaching the center content product links.

Also, I wonder since I have all the links to categories on the left column of the homepage, should I add nofollow on all the other category and product pages via the SSI file?

TED: "Another BIG problem is that each individual product has 3 separate links on each category page. Your product image, your "click for price or to purchase" link, and the product name link."
Would it help to add "nofollow" to 2 of the 3 links? I looked on your homepage and you have essentially the same setup for your tips tables and no "nofollow" on any of the redundant links, but of course, you don't have a left column filled with links as I do to precede the links.

Link Farm Question:
I have HarmonicaStore product ads on all my other harmonica websites in the right column? From what I read last night, this might be construed as Link Farming. Should I add the "nofollow" to all those right column SSI files also since the pages are being spidered already?
Examples:
http://www.davegage.com/tipsstuf/tabs_twinkle.html
http://www.harmonicalinks.com/malecoun.html

TED: "You had copied 2 older URL's above, but they both just go to Miva's version of a "Page cannot be found" page. Are those actual former URL's? If so, those both should be redirected to the new locations, and not just dead links."
Yes, I've essentially had 3 versions of Miva page links (including the default ones). I changed the Lee Oskar Harmonica product code from the SKU of "1910.html" to the more SEO-friendly "lee-oskar-harmonica-major.html". I realize this is not a make or break SEO adjustment, but I do agree with the group that sides with the usability factor for site visitors.

TED: "ALSO note that a Google sitemap isn't going to help the product pages that aren't getting picked up rank. The sitemap will help them get indexed, but to get them to rank, you'll have to address some of the issues I mentioned above."
Agreed. I've also read mixed reviews of the importance of sitemaps in regards to SEO, especially if your sitemap is generated with over 100 links on the page. (Maybe I should try to generate mine without the right column links.)

TED: "...your problem is that you're just not passing any of that strength to your product pages due top that huge left column nav."
Agreed.

TED: "...but if you want to dominate the rankings across the board, you should either tone that down by listing main cats on the home page and subcats off of their parent cat pages, or even moving it to a right column instead might help."
Agreed. I will continue to leave the "Harmonicas" and "Beginners" categories open because I have had users specifically mention how they like how that made the site easier to use (in direct comparison to other harmonica stores). I don't necessarily always put usability above SEO, but I've been reading Jakob Nielsen and others for 10 years or so and agree with most of what they have to say. In fact, most usability experts do not like links in the right column, but prefer them in the more usual left column location. At times, SEO and usability are at odds with each other.

TED: "Just friendly advice. I'm sure the store does very well, which causes many to think they don't need advice, but if you made sure it was 100% optimized instead of only 80%, think about how much more traffic you'd be getting on the daily."
Agreed. I'm all about improvement. If this wasn't the case, I wouldn't be here.

TED: "Hope this helps."
Big Understatement. I apologize for so much stuff in this last post, but I wanted to be thorough. You've been quite generous with your time, I hope you don't mind another response to my last points.

Thanks for all your help,
Dave

**harmonicalessons** · 07-30-09, 10:41 PM

Re: Miva seo-friendly links and Google indexing

I'm still working on the SEO issues and after about 20 hours of research this last week...

Here's what I know (I think):

1. "nofollow" today seems to be a no-go. According to Matt Cutts last month, it won't help or hurt-
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/
http://www.bruceclay.com/newsletter/...owtactics.html

2. Keep your total page links under 100 if you want them all spidered. Keep it much lower on the homepage to retain "link juice".

3. A competitor that came out of no where to get on page one of a google search for "harmonica" loses out to me in every SEO/web stats aspect except that it appears this website paid a service to get link backs from 305 other sites that are non-harmonica related (I have 35 links in from actual harmonica related site�these stats are according to Alexa. Also according to Alexa, I'm ranked about 1.1 million in the world while this competitor is at 2.6 million.)

It certainly seems that the number of sites linking in is one of the very top ranking factors for Google (at least at the moment). I don't believe that this competitor's actions would necessarily be considered "link farming" by Google, but it might. And, I'm not sure if this will hurt their rankings in the future, but it's certainly helping now.

4. For keywords, you can't beat loading the page title. Meta-tags seem fairly useless at this point, even the meta-description according to a recent Matt Cutts video.

5. Content is still of course King, but there are tricks of the SEO trade that will negate quality content (see my number point above) and get some sites ranked higher without it.

6. SEO work and usability are both important, but they don't always play together nicely. SEO will get the customers to your website, usability will keep them coming back.

What I don't know:

1. Whether or not only the first level categories count or all total associated links are counted when using CSS drop-down menus. Do spiders only count the first level? If you look at the page source of many SEO'd sites you will see that the sub-menus can contain 100+ second and third level page links. The appearance to the visitor is that there are only 8 categories unless you hover over one of them. Many of these bigger sites, especially shopping sites, also have left column links, and in theory, these would be not spidered.

2. Is a sitemap really that important? Not everyone agrees it is if you have done a good job of Page-Rank Sculpting on your site. Submitting an XML site map to the Google Webmasters Tools may be a good idea if you have a new site. I've been up first as an affiliate site and now as a direct sale Miva store for over 8 years and I don't believe it will do me much good (I could be wrong).

3. iFrames? Some believe it can help in retaining link juice and in PR Sculpting, but I'm not so sure about this one.

4. "Tags" section? Many sites, especially blog sites, seem to have a visible tag (keywords) section on their page. It seems like an accepted way of keyword stuffing.

5. Google Webmaster Tools? I'm not sure I trust the Google Corp. or any corporation with too much of my information. I purposely chose not to use Google Analytics with my Miva store for this reason. (I went with the Pulse- Store Statistics and I've been happy with it.)
--

Anyways, these are the thoughts of a guy who's had websites since 1997 and has been using SEO tactics since before the phrase existed (although I admittedly got lazy the last few years and didn't pay as much attention as I should have). Time to go back to my store and remove some of the 2nd level category links from my left column navigation.

Thanks,
Dave

**Mark Simon** · 07-31-09, 08:05 AM

Re: Miva seo-friendly links and Google indexing

Dave,

Let me go through and add some clarification for you to your points:

Here's what I know (I think):

1. Correct

2. Correct (the fewer the better for indexing)

3. Alexa data has no affect on search rankings and it can be very skewed depending on if your audience is well represented in the Alexa panel. The linking thing is definitely a piece that can be gamed for short term gain. I recommend working on getting more good links to your site from websites that have not linked to you. You want to get as many links as you can from different websites (domains) and you want the text of the link to be the keyword you want to rank for so it is important to look at the anchor text for incoming links to a site.

4. Using keywords in the title is important. I disagree with not using a meta tag; if you have a well crafted unique meta tag then google will almost always display that especially if some of the words in the search query are in the meta description.

5. I agree that links are more important than content in terms of ranking right now. This has been widely known as the "click here" affect. If you search for click here the number one result is the Adobe PDF download because everyone links to that page with the text "click here". This is also how "Google Bombing" is possible.

6. Usability is more important than SEO; and I'm an SEO! It does no good to get people to your site if they can't use it.

What I don't know:

1. Drop down menu links are counted. The best way to see what the Search Engine does is to search for the URL in question, click on the "Cached" link in the search results, then click on "Text only version".

2. The best thing about a sitemap is being able to verify webmaster tools for Google, Yahoo & Bing (although the Yahoo one is likely going away).

3. iFrames fall in a grey area in my opinion. The way to use iFrames for sculpting is you include the iframe but stop the search engine bots from crawling the iFrame page with links using robots.txt. I think you are better off spending the time getting quality links.

4. What purpose would a tag serve on your e-commerce site? My bet is none so don't use it. Tags work on blogs and other sites because they bring back content specific to the tags topic. Your categories serve this purpose on an ecommerce site.

5. Google Webmaster Tools doesn't give Google any more information than they can get without you signing up. This is good to see if Google is having trouble crawling or indexing your site. It will also show you what pages have links to them that are 404 pages so you can redirect.

Hope this helps.

**harmonicalessons** · 08-03-09, 01:03 PM

Re: Miva seo-friendly links and Google indexing

Mark,

Thanks a lot for the comments and feedback.

Sitemaps: I went ahead and created an .xml sitemap and referenced it in the robots.txt file. I also have the Miva smap.html sitemap up (without the header and left column links included--gets right to the product listings). I'm not sure if 2 sitemaps being used this way is over kill or not or would hurt SEO-wise. If I was to get rid of one, it would be the Miva one which doesn't include my external category pages.

Google Webmaster Tool: I won't explain in this post why I believe that submitting here could hurt me in the long run, but if you email me privately, I'll be happy to explain my thoughts on this.

Server Question: It seems like when I started way back when that some pages on the server that I didn't have active links to still got indexed. This doesn't appear to be the case now. Is this true for all the search engines?

SEO Gurus: I've been reading and following- Matt Cutts, Bruce Clay, and Dan Thies (Dan has a free 100-page SEO .pdf book I recently downloaded). Anyone else I should be paying attention to?

This Weeks Plan: Clean up my left column links (close down categories); and submit to free directories, vertical searches, search engines, and any one-way link sites I can find.

Thanks again,
Dave

**harmonicalessons** · 08-05-09, 12:41 PM

Re: Miva seo-friendly links and Google indexing

Quick note to any one following this string of posts.

The 301 Redirects didn't actually work. I did find an answer with a search here at the forums from David:

"Redirects won't work when the url contains arguments as it doesn't look at that." from-
http://extranet.mivamerchant.com/for...t=redirect+301

Here's the code I added to the .htaccess file for one redirect:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} Screen=PROD&Store_Code=HS&Product_Code=1910
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.harmonicastore.com/produc...ca-major.html? [R=301,L]

Thanks,
Dave

Announcement

Miva seo-friendly links and Google indexing

Miva seo-friendly links and Google indexing

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment