Homepage best sellers / new products now unseen by google?

[EdHarrison]

I have always used the new products / best sellers to promote products on the homepage - until very recently google would see these quickly and they would appear well placed on page 1 or 2. Ok it would only be the homepage that linked from the result but the actual url of the product would soon follow.

I am not sure if the recent upgrade has caused this or a change in google but it has lost us some advantages.

Ok we can all build a basic text / hyperlink homepage that google will see but the simplicity of the best seller type layouts are very practical.

The text on the best seller layouts can still be copied from the homepage so it is visible and not a graphic but for some reason google now ignores this text.

[peblaco]

They added rel nofollow on marketing lists links so they are ignored by search engines.

[EdHarrison]

Thanks Louise - you are always a mine of information, I will try to find a workaround as for me the google recognition of products on my homepage was really productive!

I can see the nofollow in the layouts now in design view - should be optional as I had a very well visited homepage until recently :

My homepage is now pretty empty as far as google sees - thanks sellerdeck.

[peblaco]

Can you give an example of the problem?.

[EdHarrison]

Google would always show any product in the home page best sellers within a day or two, very prominently and by clicking the result the user would end up on our homepage - this was how we got customers searching for a particular new or in demand item. Since the change only items with their own url or product page are found when searching on Google - sometimes way down the lists.

The text could be copied and pasted to Google and a very high result would appear - now any text from the best sellers appears nowhere, maybe the nofollow dropped the relevance of the text if no links are seen.

As an experiment I have attempted to remove the nofollow and will report back after a few days...

[peblaco]

It could be that because the home page is crawled more often than other pages.

[completerookie]

perhaps I'm being cynical.
it wouldn't be google trying to slowly force everyone to use their paid-for shopping system

[EdHarrison]

It worked - I am now getting 1st page results on products on our homepage again, much happier with the control this gives us - the ability to promote an item on our homepage knowing Google will also get it ranked high and noticed.

[EdHarrison]

I find this especially helpful to get a new product noticed, this way Google usually gets it indexed high in a day or two.

[brucet]

We added nofollow to the cgi links as a temporary precaution due to Google's Panda update, to avoid having two URLs with the same content. I agree it's not the best solution. We do have a task in the pipeline to replace the cgi links with static ones. Unfortunately this has delayed longer than I would have liked, due to other work.

In the meantime, if Google treats your site better without the nofollow tags, then removing them seems like the best option for now.

[peblaco]

Canonical tags might be the way to go if you have two urls?. But static links would be preferred.

[brucet]

That's certainly an option. The logic for inserting the correct canonical URL is a little bit complicated, though, because we have to consider whether the page is SSL, whether the page name is modifiable in duplicate, whether the customer is logged in, and one or two other things. In the past we've had issues in similar areas. Ideally I would prefer to invest the effort in improving the links themselves.

[Buzby]

As I don't use any of the above mentioned, ssl, login etc is there a work around I can use in the html, something like

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.domain.co.uk/acatalog/<actinic:variable name="Canonical" />"/>

If this is possible, what variable would I use instead of Canonical?

[Buzby]

I have implemented this easily.

A new variable that is then referenced in the canonical link.

You specify an url on product or section level that is then referenced by the canonical link on the page.

To input the url I just exported a csv, copy and pasted from the url column to the canonical column and then import back into Sellerdeck.

I know that this work around is not automated by Sellerdeck, however this is better for me as it allows me to channel a bunch of similar products just to one page by changing the url in the box.

I also used a block if to not show any canonical link if the input box is blank, just really to stop any incorrect redirects if a box is accidentally left blank.

[EdHarrison]

For those interested, I put a new product on yesterday, Google has now indexed it from the homepage best sellers very highly in under 24 hrs. I will not use the nofollow unless I see a problem.