Quick Tips & Tricks to Get your eCommerce online store pages out of the Google Sandbox

Tips for getting your eCommerce Site out of the google sandbox

Once you’ve determined that your eCommerce store has pages that have been put into the Google supplemental index, you need to determine:

1.) why these PARTICULAR pages are being put there,

2.) what are the commonalities among the pages (if any), and

3.) how you can improve these pages to a point where google will move them back into the primary (i.e. searchable) index.

After you’ve run the site:yourwebsitename.com *** -view search in google, you’ll see all the pages that are included in the supplemental index. If there are over 100 of these pages, I find it easier to run a program called XENU link sleuth to download data about all these pages…

As of the time of writing this article, you can download this free program at:

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

When you download the program, run it for your own online store and wait till it finishes. When it does, you’ll see that its checked all the links on your site, downloaded the url, status, filetype, size, and title.

Export that data to Excel or another spreadsheet app like Google docs, so you can do some additional sorting operations on the data.

How to Fix 95% of the most common problems in 2 hours or less:
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The first thing that I typically do (and this generally handles MOST of the issues related to certain pages being placed in the supplemental results), is to sort the data by “Title”…. Scroll down and look for duplicate titles.

If you find many, then I would fix these first to see if this item alone will get the majority of your pages out of the SI…

There are a few ways to do this…

Depending on the number of pages that you need to update and the shopping cart that you’re using, you can 1.) update these pages TITLE tags manually in your database to make each unique OR 2.) you can have a programmer build a simple script to generate a unique title tag “on the fly”

The key for getting option #2 to work is to have a unique product name for each of your products in your database. So a unique product name might be “Model #43323-LAD – Wilson Left Handed Leather Baseball Glove”.

Your shopping cart, by default, may be displaying redundant verbiage in your TITLE tag. For example, your default shopping cart product page might say “Baseball Gloves – Wilson – Leather – Left Handed – Model #43323-LAD” as the title.

There are several issues with this title tag:

#1 – Its not probably going to be seen as unique since, as defined by the default shopping cart TITLE tag display coding, all OTHER products in similar categories and sub-categories will have a similar TITLE tag prefix… i.e. “Baseball Gloves – Wilson – Leather – Left Handed -”

The problem becomes even more significant when looking at the higher level categories, such as “Baseball Gloves” which might have thousands of other products with this same title tag prefix..

#2 – Its fairly long. Title tags should be no more than 66 characters (including spaces)

#3 – The most unique identifier is NOT at the beginning. You would always want to put the most unique identifier about a product (in this case the “Model #43323-LAD” portion) at the very front of your Title tag, to ensure that google sees it, determines it to be unique content, and continues indexing your site..

Use these simple but effective eCommerce product TITLE tag templaes that will help you always have unique TITLE’s:

“MODEL_# – PRODUCT_NAME only $SALES_PRICE”

“MODEL_# – PRODUCT_NAME On-Sale Today Only $SALES_PRICE”

(fyi – terms in ALL CAPS are intended to be pulled from product database)

Now, when you have the unique title tags in place, then you need to “ping” your sitemap page… your sitemap can either be an html/php/other page OR an rss feed that lists all of the pages on your website.

The easiest way to do this is to add a post on your own blog (or a free one you create at wordpress.com or blogger.com) that includes a link to the sitemap url. If you don’t have a blog or want to set one up, just use a free ping service like http://pingoat.com/ to ping that sitemap page.

Wait a week, then re-run the site:yourwebsitename.com *** -view search in google and see how many of your pages have been removed from the supplemental index.

If this technique doesn’t fix the majority of your problems, check back often as I’ll be going over more advanced eCommerce store tips and tricks to get your site out of the supplemental index in later lessons.