acatalog

[Joelsim]

Hi all,

I've been told that Hummingbird likes pages to be linked directly to the homepage for SEO without 'acatalog'. Is there any way that this can be looked at/changed?

Currently my pages are:

http://www.musictoyourears.co.uk/aca...uru.html#SID=7

When they should be:

http://www.musictoyourears.co.uk/aia...uru.html#SID=7

I've also had a number of people say that I haven't got a sitemap, but again I have with 'acatalog'.

Thanks

Joel

[Mike Hughes]

I suspect you've been told wrong, or maybe misunderstood.

Hummingbird was all about meaningful content on the page and how it relates to the deduced reason behind the search. i.e. Google is trying to better understand what people are searching for and provide them results that are meaningful and relevant rather than just keyword matches.

The next time someone tells you something like this then ask them why it is the case. If they can't explain it then the chances are they don't know they're talking about. Google's algorithms can be complex but the logic behind them is usually very straightforward.

In this case, I'd love to hear why having /acatalog/ in the path to a page would make Google believe the page is less relevant than the same page without it.

Mike

PS. Regarding the sitemap. They might be talking about a sitemap that can be submitted to Google. This is to help Google find all the pages on your site and identify the site structure. As long as your site is easily navigated (and most sellerdeck sites are) then this isn't necessary. You can check your site in your google webmaster tools and as long as all your pages are indexed then you have nothing to worry about.

[David Clarke]

But is there a way to make the site up without having acatalog in every link?

[NormanRouxel]

There's a 2003 thread on this. See http://community.sellerdeck.com/show...&threadid=2582 post #2.
However, you'll be ignoring the good advice posted above and making your site non-standard and risky to maintain / support.

And making all existing search engine links invalid.

And you'll have to deal with renaming the index.html (store top page) that was in acatalog to something new as you already have an index.html (brochure home page) in your site root.

Another safer solution would be to go into Web / Network Setup and change the acatalog to something meaningful for your site. You'll still lose existing search engine links but these will repair themselves in time.

P.S. I'm sure the BBC News pages get indexed even though these pages are at http://www.bbc.com/news/

[David Clarke]

Actually I just thought having acatalog in every weblink looked a bit cack and would prefer something like www.bbc.co.uk/news rather than bbc.co.uk/acatalog/news.

However it seems there is no easy way to change this and it will have consequences so I won't change it. Thanks for the advice.

[Joelsim]

Thanks all.

I do upload sitemaps to Google using Webmaster Tools with 'acatalog' in the name.

Is it worth someone from Sellerdeck checking whether the Hummingbird update does actually affect SEO with Google as that is crucial to everything really?

[Duncan Rounding]

Actually I just thought having acatalog in every weblink looked a bit cack and would prefer something like www.bbc.co.uk/news rather than bbc.co.uk/acatalog/news.

However it seems there is no easy way to change this and it will have consequences so I won't change it. Thanks for the advice.

As mentioned you can rename the acatalog directory to something else such as 'shop' or 'store' easily in the network settings - BUT this will also break any links and affect your Google listings so you will need to set up some permanent redirects.

[David Clarke]

I wish I had changed the acatalog a long time ago but I don't want to change it now because of the problems of losing links in Google.