Disappeared from search engines

[gail]

There seems to be a problem with our site. http://www.scottishgifts4u.co.uk/
Putting in the term 'scottish gifts' we usually come up on page 1.

Now however the search engines are unable to find the home page, instead the first page that comes up is the catalogue page.

We haven’t altered any of the coding but have recently bought a new computer and changed from XP to Windows 7. This was producing an error message about test mode in the meta tags so we downloaded a patch from the Actinic site which appeared to fix it.

Is this related to the error message/patch or will it be something completely different?

We would be grateful for some advice.

[NormanRouxel]

we downloaded a patch from the Actinic site which appeared to fix it

Unlikely that anyone can help without clearer details of what you did there.

[gail]

We installed Actinic Ecommerce v9.0.5 Upgrade

Which is described as ' containing several important bug fixes.'

This got rid of the error messages so we assumed that was one of the 'bugs'

We don't know if this is related to our problem or not as we are unaware of exactly when the problem started.

Is there something in our coding that causes the search engines to disregard the page?

[Duncan Rounding]

I suspect that this nay be due to you having essentially duplicated content on both your domain root homepage and your catalog homepage. Google would therefore only list one of the pages.

Try optimising the content on the root homepage.

[Mike Hughes]

I rather suspect it's a problem with your incoming links.

At the moment they all seem to come from forums discussing motoring issues and I wouldn't be surprised if Google now considers these to be irrelevant to the topic of your website. Essentially leaving your website unloved and unimportant.

Mike

[gail]

Oh...The motoring links I can disable if necessary, I thought any links are better than no links at all but obviously not, I just use the website in my signature when i'm posting messages.

Optimising the content, how will I do that? Are we using the same meta tags for both pages or am i on the wrong track? Is it something I can do myself.

Assuming I get it fixed, how soon before Google picks up the home page again?

[pinbrook]

Oh...The motoring links I can disable if necessary, I thought any links are better than no links at all but obviously not, I just use the website in my signature when i'm posting messages.

incoming links need to be relevant to the site,so unlessyou sell cars or car accessories it isnt of benefit

Optimising the content, how will I do that? Are we using the same meta tags for both pages or am i on the wrong track? Is it something I can do myself.

each page must have unique metas etc, not that google uses meta tags. thus each page must have unique content. if both pages are the same you need to ask yourself why have 2 similar pages? and have a think how to make one of them target different keywords

Assuming I get it fixed, how soon before Google picks up the home page again?

as soon as each page is unique and google revisits it should be ranked

[guccij]

Assuming I get it fixed, how soon before Google picks up the home page again?

Are you using Google Webmaster Tools? Because you can resubmit a sitemap at any time. And, you can check quickly then what your index status is.
Have a look at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com - it's free. You just need to ftp it to the root of your server. Some people have had issues with xml sitemaps but it hasn't been a problem for us. Yet.

[TraceyHand]

There is also a free Google Sitemap tool from Mole End, which is designed to extract the relevent information from your Actinic store and can also upload from within the tool.
http://www.mole-end.biz/acatalog/GoogleSiteMap.html

[Mike Hughes]

The site is indexed in Google, it just is ranking very badly at the moment.

Mike

[DiskDepot]

Too much Caffeine (Irn Bru and coffee not to blame this time...)

I rather suspect it's a problem with your incoming links.

At the moment they all seem to come from forums discussing motoring issues and I wouldn't be surprised if Google now considers these to be irrelevant to the topic of your website. Essentially leaving your website unloved and unimportant.

Gail, when did the problem with your website start? Google changed their indexing architecture in (IIRC) May and June with their Caffeine project, which has replaced the older one. Many people are complaining of having lost ranking around the time of the Caffeine rollout.

Oh...The motoring links I can disable if necessary, I thought any links are better than no links at all but obviously not

I don't know for sure, but *if* your ranking dropped because of changes in Google's indexing rules, I'm guessing it's more likely that you're not being penalised for the motoring links as such... you're just not being given as much credit for them as you were before. In which case, removing them wouldn't make any difference.

(Can anyone confirm if this assumption is correct or not?)

[Mike Hughes]

You can never be sure with Google as they tend to keep the details secret.

On the whole though I'd agree with you. Google's approach tends to be not to penalise for external factors, just to exclude any potential benefit. This prevents a competitor from being able to mess up your rankings by doing something you have no control over to try and get your website penalised.

So removing the links is unlikely to make much diffrence. It's just that with no benefit from them your site is looking very unloved.

Mike

[Paul Bulpit]

incoming links need to be relevant to the site,so unlessyou sell cars or car accessories it isnt of benefit

So why do so many of you have links in your signatures?

The suggestion being that it does more harm than good?

__________
Paul

like Tracey, somewhere warm. Unfortunately I have to come back in a couple of weeks!

[TraceyHand]

Paul

like Tracey, somewhere warm. Unfortunately I have to come back in a couple of weeks!

don't do it!

[gail]

Ok, I have removed text from the catalogue page, I am hoping this will make enough of a difference.

The next step presumably would be a redesign of that page removing all the other info and just leaving a plain product page which i'd rather not do but will if necessary.

Submitted a sitemap and did a reconsideration request on the 16th.

Still no signs of the home page, http://www.scottishgifts4u.co.uk/ still brings up the catalogue page first with no signs of the home page at all. I know it all takes time but 'scottish gifts' is our main search term and we're appearing on page 26!!

Is it just a matter of waiting or should something have happened by now? I realise we may have to climb the rankings a bit again but it would be encouraging if the page would at least appear.