Web filter disaster!

[Shacks]

I sell womens swimwear at http://www.bikinishack.co.uk I have been very careful not to use keywords such as sexy bikinis in the titles, meta tags, etc as I didn't want the site penalised in any way by web filter software. As it turns out, my website gets barred anyway, can anybody give me some advice on how to get over this problem? I have noticed a drop in sales during the daytime over the last two years. I have had previous customers emailling me to explain that the site is now barred on their office pc's. I really don't know what to do. Help !!!!!!

[leehack]

Have the visits to your site dropped also? Using the trend of the past 2 days to define what is happening to your site is a little fast and things can easily fluctuate over such a short period.

I don't expect many are thinking about bikinis in this country at the moment and i doubt that it is a main time of the year for people to go away and need one. It may just be down to the time of the year.

[Shacks]

Two years

Hi Lee, the daytime orders have dropped over the last two years. The majority of our orders were placed during weekdays and of a daytime, slowly the orders during the day have dropped off and some previous customers have emailled to let me know that their office pc's have barred them from the site.
site stats show more hits during the evening where before their would be a spike from 11:00 to 14:00.
http://www.bikinishack.co.uk

[leehack]

Two years! sorry i misread. Orders have been slipping for 2 years and you ask now?

Do you know how people get to your site, is it through the SERPS and you have just slowly moved down the results until the organic traffic is minimal. Did you use adwords or anything similar to promote your site 2 years ago.

I don't know what words are added into filters, but maybe bikini has been added to stop women surfing and get some work done. I would suggest that you have a look at your webstats and look for answers/trends. A 2 year period is very difficult if not impossible to gauge with the minimal info we have to use.

[Duncan Rounding]

Lots of companies are now tightening up their filtering software in an effort to save their bandwidth rather than just 'adult content' and I would suspect that just the word 'bikini' would trigger them. There's little you can do I would think unfortunately. One consolation is that I would expect your competitors have the same problem.

You perhaps need to think of other channels to market your site to improve the sales.

[Shacks]

Yes this is a problem.

Yes this is a real problem, we do get our name out there in other areas of media but of course we end up back to square one. We are an internet business who only sell online and if a percentage of people only have pc / internet access at work and if these companies bar our site then we are buggered. Never mind I'm sure that if I owned a company that employed a load of people I would also bar staff from looking at lovely girls in bikinis.

http://www.bikinishack.co.uk

[leehack]

Never mind I'm sure that if I owned a company that employed a load of people I would also bar staff from looking at lovely girls in bikinis.

I can personally recommend this, great looking site

[Donald Gray]

I can personally recommend this, great looking site

Agreed!

However, I can understand the issues - the only thing I can think of, apart from heavily marketing the web address etc., is to add the following meta tag in the heading to each web page:

<meta name="document-rating" content="Safe for Kids" />

It may help some - I don't know - certainly can't hurt...

[chris ashdown]

Maybe try swopping Bikini for two-piece for a month and see what happens

As the customers online can see the items it does not matter what you call them, a bikini can be anything you want to call it "surfers two piece", "Red Two-piece" etc

For SEO then maybe you have to take a hit with the keyword Bikin and concentrate more on Swimwear, Ladies Swimwear, Ladies Two-Piece swimwear etc


PS have you got any screensavers of the girls?

[Donald Gray]

Maybe try swopping Bikini for two-piece for a month and see what happens

Or even spelling it with a space between each letter: B i k i n i

[Shacks]

Catch 22, it's a great idea to use two piece or b i k i n i s but I have worked really hard to get a good ranking with terms like Roxy bikinis, Billabong bikinis etc with Google. I have spoken to the IT department of a web filtering company they have advised me to email or speak to the key players:

securecomputing.com
surfcontrol.com
trendmicro.com

I have emailled all of them and will try to speak to them tomorrow to find out how the whole thing works. The guy I spoke to said that it works on catagory, so my site would fall into swimwear and shopping catagories. (sorry about the spelling)

Hopefully I'll be a little bit wiser tomorrow.

http://www.bikinishack.co.uk

[Jarvis]

I'm not convinced that the problem lies simply with companies blocking websites.
I'd be looking at my RAW log files to find out where my traffic is REALLY coming from.

How many people buy Bikinis whilst at work?
Far more likely to be buying from home.
The British Computer Society reports 96.6% of houshold will have broadband available by 2008.
I would also be looking at the increased competition over the last two years and changes in 'buyer behavior'.

If it is Bikinis that you sell, then it is Bikinis that you should be using to promote your website, in Title, Keywords, Description, Product titles & Descriptions and Metatags.
I have taken a quick look at the site and can see a number of areas where you are NOT taking advantage of simple Search Engine Optimization techniques.
For example, 'Alt' tags are taken from product titles and therefore I would be calling products 'Pink Brazillian Bikini' not 'Pink Brazillian'.
Especially on your site because of the way you show three images per product, you would add an extra four 'bikini' counts to the keyword density for every product.
You can be doing a whole lot more in optimizing your site.
To my mind, that's where you should be putting your effort.

Good luck, it's a nice site.

[BeerHunter]

As an IT Manager I can tell you that we block sites such as this. Reason being is that there is no reason why an employee should be accessing a bikini site. It has nothing to do with their daily work. Until recently we have used keyword blocking but we have now moved to a subscription based service. I would look into domain aliases to get "bikini" out of the URL. I really can't think of any other way around it.

[leehack]

It has nothing to do with their daily work.

It boosts moral.

[Shacks]

Update from the web filter companies.... Sites are put into catagories as was explained to me yesterday. The web filter software companies populate these catagories and then when the end user implements the software they can choose which catagories they will allow their staff to view. Bikini Shack is in 2 seperate catagories 'Intimate Apparel/Swimsuit' and 'shopping'. It is possible to contact these software companies:

securecomputing.com
surfcontrol.com
trendmicro.com

If you feel the your site is in the wrong catagory(s) but it looks like they are really accurate.

If you work for a company that runs web filter software it is possible to contact the IT department to have a site put on a 'white list' the IT Department will vett the site and maybe allow access to staff.

I think the way forward is for me is to send a bulk email to my customers informing them of the paragraph above. So if they want to contact their IT department they can.

I will concentrate on better SEO, I have implemented a lot but I can see what Jarvis is on about. Unfortunatly by having a long product name my layout gets really screwed up but maybe I should rethink the layout of my products. It's a shame Actinic takes the product name and uses it as the Alt tag instead of just giving a field to input what ever Alt tag we want.

Well I've learnt a lot over the last few days,

thanks for the input.

Shacks

http://www.bikinishack.co.uk