Google Search Advice

[dfsfixings]

Right, so i need some clear, succinct advice towards google searching my website. It appears as though:

(a) sometimes when google finds my website it finds a web address called secure.secure.co.uk rather than my actual url www.dfsfixings.com
(b) It seems as though certain pages from the website don't appear in the search almost as thought google doesnt know they exist. Is this to do with my website not being indexed recently?
(c) Is there a way to force google to index my site so as to find all of these new pages?

Cheers
Michael

P.S. Sellerdeck Support that we pay so much money for is worse than useless i've come here for some actual advice

[Southwest Test]

Hi Michael,

In answer to your queries:

(a) Can you elaborate a bit more on this? I can't quite grasp what you mean. When searching for DFS Fixings on Google I didn't see any mention of secure.secure.co.uk in the search results. Or have I misinterpreted your question?

(b) This is pretty much par for the course... see this thread:

sitemaps

If you want to see EXACTLY how many pages of your own site Google has currently indexed, then type the following in Google's search box:

site:dfsfixings.com

The results returned will give you a clear indicator as to which pages Google currently sees as ranking more or less in importance

(c) Unfortunately you can't 'force' Google to index your entire site as such. However, there are a few things you can do which may increase the number of successfully indexed pages. You need to explore the various options open to you in Google Webmaster Tools. I'm assuming you have a (free) account? If not, you need one!

You can submit or resubmit your site map more or less as often as you like. This usually stirs the Googlebot's curiosity into revisiting your site just in case you've added some new pages of great interest

You can now also request indexation of a single page by using the new (as of last summer) Submit URL to Index feature, again in Webmaster Tools. From memory I think there is a maximum limit of ten manual submissions per month though.

You can also increase and/or speed up indexation by ensuring that the pages which you ask the bot to search are themselves heavily linked (internally) - in this way the spider will be more likely to scan deeper through your site and find other pages it might otherwise miss.

Above all, the best advice is simply to invest some time and energy in basic SEO, as at the end of the day Google will almost certainly index your content providing it is unique and valuable to the end user.

[Mike Hughes]

As Paul says, the first thing to do is set up and validate your Google webmaster account. This will show you the number of your website pages that Google are including in their search index.

The biggest mistake you're making that I can see is the number of links a visitor has to follow to get to your actual content. There are too many intermediate steps and these also have have pretty much no content (never mind useful content) on them.

Google will only include pages in the results that are 'relevant' ( which means have relevant content on them) and 'important' (which means not hidden away deep in the bowels of your site).

For example, to get to 'wood screws' I have to go via 'Fixings and fasteners' > 'Screws' > 'Wood Screws' to get to your products and there's still no actual relevant text on the 'wood screws' page other than the links to your different wood screws.

In the short term you can make the pages more visible by including a link to your sellerdeck site map.

Longer term, you need to put relevant and detailed information on all your pages and to increase the importance of these pages by getting more links to your site (and deep links to your product pages). If you can, reducing the number of steps from your home page to your products pages will also help increase their visibility.

Mike

[dfsfixings]

i have got google webmaster tools thing set up but the sitemap only says it includes 180 or our 20 odd thousand pages/products. This confused me for a start. Also, the amount of clicks to get to content has worried me in the past but i dont know a good way of speeding it up due to the sheer amount of items we sell.

Also on the subject of the securesecure.co.uk thing if you search "makita rt0700c leicester" and look at the top of the second page it is our website under the secure url i stated earlier.

[Southwest Test]

Also on the subject of the securesecure.co.uk thing if you search "makita rt0700c leicester" and look at the top of the second page it is our website under the secure url i stated earlier.

That looks like a reference to the provider of your SSL security certificate. It looks as if Google has cached that particular page in the past for some reason. It's not something to overly worry about, but if you're really conscientious then you can use your robots.txt file to exclude certain pages from the Google index, which would reduce the number of anomalies like that.


UPDATE: it certainly is... I put an item in the cart and went to the checkout and that SSL URL comes up in the browser address bar. Google has obviously indexed a shopping cart page at some point. Read up on what your robots text file can do. That, along with the other options in Webmaster Tools, should allow you to nail down only the specific content you really want indexed.

But like I say, it's a very minor thing.

[peblaco]

Page load times are slow too, i.e. Power Tools section, I noticed the images slow to load, they seem to be loading in large images which are squashed down. Some sections are loading images 1200 pixels wide scaled to 150 pixels. These could all be better optimised.

[dfsfixings]

ive kicked some image optimization software into gear so it should be sorted soon

UPDATE: SO i just optimised the images and the file went from 1.72gb of images down to 370mb. It may have been causing a few issues with load time :P

[mediamole]

By default SellerDeck uses the same product image layout for summary and single product per page. (One of my personal pet hates with the software)

This means that when you have large images like you do (640 by 480), although they look small they are actually large, hence page load issues mentioned by Louise @ Peblaco.

If you're not using extended info image then use that layout for single product per page layout and the standard image layout for all your summary product layouts. That would then allow you to create two sets of images i.e. a big and small version at true size instead of using inline CSS to scale large images like your sites current layout does.

[markhallgate]

Hi, what software did you use to optimise the site, we have a similar problem with ours being slow loading.