Any top ranking sites using Osc on Yahoo/Google?

[jesse9201]

Hello To All,

 

I love oscommerce, but my sites never rank very well in the search engines (Google and Yahoo to be exact).

 

This may be due to a bunch of reasons, but out of curiosity, I searched on both S.E.s for keywords like lingerie, hardware, software, and dvd to see if any of these were osc sites within the top 3 pages of either search engine. None seemed to be oscommerce sites! (mostly ASP and html sites per the "view source").

 

So, how does your oscommerce rank in Google and/or Yahoo? Is there anyone in this forum enjoying top ranking in the first 3 pages for their keywords/phrases in either Google/Yahoo?

 

Best wishes

Jess

[tina_boots]

Hello To All,

 

I love oscommerce, but my sites never rank very well in the search engines (Google and Yahoo to be exact).

 

This may be due to a bunch of reasons, but out of curiosity, I searched on both S.E.s for keywords like lingerie, hardware, software, and dvd to see if any of these were osc sites within the top 3 pages of either search engine. None seemed to be oscommerce sites! (mostly ASP and html sites per the "view source").

 

So, how does your oscommerce rank in Google and/or Yahoo? Is there anyone in this forum enjoying top ranking in the first 3 pages for their keywords/phrases in either Google/Yahoo?

 

Best wishes

Jess

 

One of the sites I work on is in the top ten with Google for all of her key words. This particular site does not use any of the SEO contributions. Nor does it have a lot of work in the header meta tags other than the description. What it does have is a plain HTML index page with a lot of information and text which relate to the products being sold. It also has around twenty to thirty inbound links from sites that are related to the subject matter.

 

The osC portion of the site resides in the /catalog/ folder off of the root. The product pages are being indexed by Google because I frequently come across those page in search results.

 

This is just my opinion, however it is based on successful results, that the two most important things related to SEO are building likes with good sites that are related somehow to the subject of your site. And ensuring that when the search engine spiders visit the site, they have no trouble figuring out under which key words to classify it. Others may have experienced success concentrating in other areas, this is just what has worked for me.

 

Search results also have a lot to do with how many other sites out there are attempting to push the same thing. If there are a hundred sites out there with the same keywords and they all do SEO perfectly, there are still only ten of them that will make the first page of results. So in addition to all of the other things, somehow separating yourself from the pack is very important.

 

And BTW, those search results are constantly changing, so even if you have managed to find yourself up there near the top, you can't just forget about it. You have to keep monitoring things, changing and tweaking in order to stay there.

 

And one final note, even though I have had success with one site, I've worked on a few others that are still struggling, so there is no simple magic that works every time....

 

Tina

[♥toyicebear]

Hello To All,

 

I love oscommerce, but my sites never rank very well in the search engines (Google and Yahoo to be exact).

 

This may be due to a bunch of reasons, but out of curiosity, I searched on both S.E.s for keywords like lingerie, hardware, software, and dvd to see if any of these were osc sites within the top 3 pages of either search engine. None seemed to be oscommerce sites! (mostly ASP and html sites per the "view source").

 

So, how does your oscommerce rank in Google and/or Yahoo? Is there anyone in this forum enjoying top ranking in the first 3 pages for their keywords/phrases in either Google/Yahoo?

 

Best wishes

Jess

 

Hi,

 

I know many osc sites which rank very well, when you look be aware that an osc shop can have many different url styles...

 

click on the link Seo & Sef url in my signature under to see examples...

[Guest]

Our new site went up 2 weeks ago (Jan 9th) and for our keywords I just checked and we rank;

 

MSN

Bean Coffee Shop #1 & 2

Bean Coffee #1

Coffee Shop #3

Coffee #118

Coffee Bean #59

 

Yahoo

Bean Coffee Shop #2

Bean Coffee #109

Coffee Shop #413

Coffee #674

Coffee Bean #591

 

I am happy with that considering we don't have any links back to our site, no DMOZ listing, nor directory listing, etc. It has only been 2 weeks. I am trying to get some quality links for our keywords such as coffee. We are also in a very competative market. Google is reindexing the site because we changed out meta descriptions so we are not really on there right now. I haven't checked to see how our products are ranking.

 

SEO is just another aspect of owning an online store, first you have to learn how to build your store, then learn how to run it, and also learn how to market it. We use Header Tags and Ultimate SEO URL's. There are lots of good threads here and also lots of good resouces on the internet.

[kitchenniche]

Hello To All,

 

I love oscommerce, but my sites never rank very well in the search engines (Google and Yahoo to be exact).

 

This may be due to a bunch of reasons, but out of curiosity, I searched on both S.E.s for keywords like lingerie, hardware, software, and dvd to see if any of these were osc sites within the top 3 pages of either search engine. None seemed to be oscommerce sites! (mostly ASP and html sites per the "view source").

 

So, how does your oscommerce rank in Google and/or Yahoo? Is there anyone in this forum enjoying top ranking in the first 3 pages for their keywords/phrases in either Google/Yahoo?

 

Best wishes

Jess

 

 

My site is for its main keyword on Page 1 on google.com (Page 1 - rank 9), on google.ca (Page 1 - rank 2), on both yahoo.com and yahoo.ca (Page 1 - rank 1), on both msn.com and msn.ca (page 1 - rank 1)

[TampaTech]

I wondered if someone could shed some light on this issue:

 

I converted one of my online stores over to OSCommerce site back in early January 2006. I installed the Header Tags Controller and Chemo's Ultimate SEO URL at that time. In my .htaccess file, I used redirects to re-map the old URLs to the new URLs. When I first set up the redirects, I just used "redirect" instead of "redirect permanent". After about a month, I realized that I should have made them "redirect permanents" to help maintain my ranking, so I made the change. I don't think this caused a problem, but who knows.

 

After my site was live for about 3 weeks, I noticed that my ranking in Google had plummeted from about 26 to 931 !! It has hovered around 935 for my keyword since that time (a little over 2 months).

 

My guess is that Google will just need some time to recognize the new web page names (-c-xx.html and -p-xx.html) that are on the new site and that over time, my rank will return to normal.

 

QUESTION: Has anyone had a similar experience? If so, about how long did it take for the rankings to return to normal ????? I am also using the Google XML Sitemap, but that doesn't seem to be speeding up the "return to normal rankings" issue.

 

Thanks.

[Guest]

After my site was live for about 3 weeks, I noticed that my ranking in Google had plummeted from about 26 to 931 !! It has hovered around 935 for my keyword since that time (a little over 2 months).

 

After posting above we are suffering the same thing. Once day we are number 1, then 67 then 350 and all over the place. Then some days Google uses our title tag and others it has our DMOZ description. I can't figure out what they are doing or why.

 

That was after permanently redirecting our old site to our new site Jan 9/06. MSN is treating us well and Yahoo is okay.

 

I am just using this quiet time (thanks to Google) to work on getting the new site listed in directories and generating new links to the site. I don't know why they are doing this but I am glad I am not the only one.

[TampaTech]

After posting above we are suffering the same thing. Once day we are number 1, then 67 then 350 and all over the place. Then some days Google uses our title tag and others it has our DMOZ description. I can't figure out what they are doing or why.

 

That was after permanently redirecting our old site to our new site Jan 9/06. MSN is treating us well and Yahoo is okay.

 

I am just using this quiet time (thanks to Google) to work on getting the new site listed in directories and generating new links to the site. I don't know why they are doing this but I am glad I am not the only one.

 

Thanks for the insight. At least, I am not the only one feeling the hurt. MSN and Yahoo are treating me very well, so it is just a Google thing. I wouldn't feel as frustrated if I only knew what is the biggest contributing factor to the plummet. If the plumment is just a temporary thing because the new pages need to get indexed, then I would feel better. If it is related to the Ultimate SEO contrib or Header Tags Controller contrib, then it worries me quite a bit. I have another site that needs to be converted and I am beginning to second-guess what should be done (use a different URL rewrite contrib like SEF URL, etc.).

 

I am also using the Links Manager contrib, but I don't believe that would cause a problem.

[Guest]

If it is related to the Ultimate SEO contrib or Header Tags Controller contrib, then it worries me quite a bit. I have another site that needs to be converted and I am beginning to second-guess what should be done (use a different URL rewrite contrib like SEF URL, etc.).

 

I use both of them and did on my previous store also, if used correctly I can't see that they would be a problem. I think it is just Google doing whatever Google does.

 

I am also using the Links Manager contrib, but I don't believe that would cause a problem.

 

Links I think you have to be more carefull with as a bad quality link can cause a lot more harm than good.

[Guest]

After my site was live for about 3 weeks, I noticed that my ranking in Google had plummeted from about 26 to 931 !! It has hovered around 935 for my keyword since that time (a little over 2 months).

 

My guess is that Google will just need some time to recognize the new web page names (-c-xx.html and -p-xx.html) that are on the new site and that over time, my rank will return to normal.

 

QUESTION: Has anyone had a similar experience? If so, about how long did it take for the rankings to return to normal ????? I am also using the Google XML Sitemap, but that doesn't seem to be speeding up the "return to normal rankings" issue.

 

Thanks.

i posted a similar problem here back in sept/oct

took me about 6-7 months to regain my rank and it still isn't what it once was, but it's a hell of a lot better.

 

gave up on google sitemaps as it hardly made a dent in the rankings, just brought google to the site more frequently

[matbennett]

I don't use header tags controller (we use something similar, but more automated that we developed in house instead). Our rankings are continuing to build across all osCommerce sites that we look after. Think our best result in #1 for a search that returns about 11 million results - so any issues you are having are probably not directly due to osCommerce.

 

The big recent changes in Google seem to be mostly centred around how incoming links are dealt with. Link exchanges in particular appear to be worth a lot less than they previously were (this is based solely on comparing sites that we have seen go up and down in the serps). The only "on site" factors that we have spotted being treated drastically different are those around the issue of duplicate content, which can be a problem if your product descriptions are short.

 

I've also spotted that Google in particular seems to be looking more for exact phrase matches on pages, rather

 

I use ultimate URLs on most sites, as I think it is a great contribution and makes the site more usable and your results more "clickable". I haven't though seen any evidence that it helps improve position or depth of spidering.

 

If you are struggling I'd agree with Java Roasters and say that links would be the first area to look at.

[Chance]

Of the 450 or so keywords we actively try to target on my current contract, we are:

 

- Within the top 10 on around 220 of them

- Within the top 5 for 50 of them

- Number 1 for around 50.

 

The rest are so far down as not to even count. I'm working on it.

 

I attribute this to:

 

1. SEO optimization- meta tags, page titles, h1 text, h2 text, bold text, italic text, text repetition on the pages, etc. I haven't bothered with SEO URLs or anything like that, and I am starting to think Google couldn't give a flying flip about URL text compared to page elements and page titles.

 

2. Back-links- we have around 150 back-links from distributors, newsgroups, forums, etc.

 

3. Quality content- We have additional general industry content (and we are developing more every day) about the industries and applications for our products and services.

 

4. Niche- There are about a million stores in our niche, but most of them suck. Poorly coded, poorly written content, poor product descriptions, etc. We give more information, have better constructed pages, and we have an overall better designed site.

 

5. Speed. Our servers are fast. Dual processor hardware with rollovers to backup hardware. We serve product videos and such off our server, so we need massive hardware to avoid lags. Most of our competitors are on shared hosting or their own dedicated servers are overloaded and slow.

[matbennett]

Niche- There are about a million stores in our niche, but most of them suck. Poorly coded, poorly written content, poor product descriptions, etc. We give more information, have better constructed pages, and we have an overall better designed site.

 

I dream of that. Wanna share what that niche is ;)

[Chance]

I dream of that. Wanna share what that niche is ;)

 

Firefighting Equipment.

[ka0osk]

I noticed in my indexing that there are things that google DONT like...

 

1:Never put a pic with the name underconstruction.gif,jpg etc ... it seems to ignore the words if you put them in, but it looks for the image names and lowers the rank alot or wont link them at all!

 

2:If all of your pages are similar, it wont index them... you need to have unique content and lots of it, to kick the interest of the spider - I would love to see that algorhytm! I have added text and gotten an immediate rise. If your descriptions are boring "blue shirt large" then you need to kick it up a bit.

 

3:It seems to like to see links on the page that go to other content. All of my pages that have links to other content or my doc files are higher ranked!

 

4:My non-osc pages have HUGELY higher ratings, so I think they are looking for the osc logos and text... I am going to change mine to other names and such to hide the osc aspect from the spiders. The tag lines at the bottom can be changed to images labeled "myimage.jpg" instead of text to hide them. I am not sure if they are looking at the link stuff after the ? in the links but I might try changing that a bit. I think the trick is to make your site look like info rather than sales, and just exclude the processing links in your robots file.

My doc file comes up #9 in google, but my sales page with almost the same content comes up 851... so I am guessing links from the doc pages would be a good thing if I can maintain session, and if google isnt just looking for osc session info to exclude ya!!! Good Grief.

 

John

ka0osk <_<

[ka0osk]

:D

GOOGLE RESULTS RANKINGS UPDATE!

I have ran a number of successful Google tests and found a few interesting things:

 

Hide the oscsid! There are a number of contribs for this, and SID KILLER is the one I used. I also needed to modify my categories due to the way I had it set up and the advanced search page.

 

Set up a good robots.txt file - exclude everything that is redundant or not going to give you the results you want... here is mine:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /admin/

Disallow: /awstats/

Disallow: /catalog/images/

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Disallow: /images/

Disallow: /widgets/

Disallow: /catalog/product_reviews_write.php

Disallow: /catalog/product_reviews.php

Disallow: /catalog/advanced_search_result.php

 

Yours will vary according to what you want to hide etc... the last 3 are just not producers, so I dont want them fogging up the results.

 

I also added the Changing the "buy now" buttons from links to forms. sub-contrib and ran several spiders to make sure all of the oscsid's were gone from the page links.

 

I added some interesting content to some pages... resubmitted for a hit from the Goog, and BLAMMO!

NOW I AM ALL OVER THE PLACE IN THE SEARCH RESULTS! WOO HOO!

 

As a test, I put a &oscsid="ioaush3df8oai7u3sd23fhuah" link tag on a doc page, and that page which was always listing high in the rankings, disappeared from Google altogether.... :)

 

ka0osk

midwesttent.com

[motorcity]

:D

GOOGLE RESULTS RANKINGS UPDATE!

I have ran a number of successful Google tests and found a few interesting things:

Hello,

I guess I'm a little confused about the robots.txt analysis page Google provides in the webmaster tools.

All it seems to do is tell me if a page is allowed or is blocked. I guess I am allowing some pages that probably don't need to have spiders crawling them but I can't figure that out from this testing page.

 

On a good note; After trying from 2 different servers, several SSL schemes, wrong file locations of the googlesitemaps, or wrong site name, finally with the cDynamic Meta & Ultimate SEO we're getting some hits after all.

Google said 7 days for indexing - it's only been 5.

We've submitted to a number of other different SE's too.

Still waiting for the majority of our products to be listed on Google, and still waiting for query stats.

[boxtel]

I noticed in my indexing that there are things that google DONT like...

 

1:Never put a pic with the name underconstruction.gif,jpg etc ... it seems to ignore the words if you put them in, but it looks for the image names and lowers the rank alot or wont link them at all!

 

2:If all of your pages are similar, it wont index them... you need to have unique content and lots of it, to kick the interest of the spider - I would love to see that algorhytm! I have added text and gotten an immediate rise. If your descriptions are boring "blue shirt large" then you need to kick it up a bit.

 

3:It seems to like to see links on the page that go to other content. All of my pages that have links to other content or my doc files are higher ranked!

 

4:My non-osc pages have HUGELY higher ratings, so I think they are looking for the osc logos and text... I am going to change mine to other names and such to hide the osc aspect from the spiders. The tag lines at the bottom can be changed to images labeled "myimage.jpg" instead of text to hide them. I am not sure if they are looking at the link stuff after the ? in the links but I might try changing that a bit. I think the trick is to make your site look like info rather than sales, and just exclude the processing links in your robots file.

My doc file comes up #9 in google, but my sales page with almost the same content comes up 851... so I am guessing links from the doc pages would be a good thing if I can maintain session, and if google isnt just looking for osc session info to exclude ya!!! Good Grief.

 

John

ka0osk <_<

 

you think, you guess, it seems, ...very scientific.

[khime]

Our OSC site is top 1 for the keywords "Cheap watches"

 

you should see precision time. co.uk

 

I think it has to mostly do with the inbound links that generate high rankings. Also we have converted our site to remove most of the tables that bloat the MS2.2

 

Bad thing is... all our product_info.php pages are in the Google supplemental index for that past few months which is really annoying and we dont know why. This means that these pages are really low down in the rankings.

 

Thing about Google is they dont tell you why your pages are in the supplemental index so you dont know how to get your pages out of the supplemental.

 

anybody else got lots of pages in the google supplelemental index?

[♥MYC267]

My site ranks pretty well on major search terms oin my field.

 

Google.com

car parts - #4

car accessories - #8

apexi - #8

hybrid intercooler - #4

 

 

Theres heaps more keywords and we rank well in all of them.

 

Google floods my site with traffic.

[khime]

Right, I've had a quick look at your site and it seems that you dont use the Ultimate SEO URL rewrite.

 

I've noticed that none of your pages are in the supplemental aswell which is good as your pages rank high and get refreshed regularly.

 

After having a look at my competitors sites they all also dont use a url rewrite (e.g /productdetail.asp?productid=4323).

 

I'm beginning to wonder now after the last google update if you use the ultimate SEO contribution then commercial pages will get put in supplemental for some reason?

 

If maybe worth investigating this as I seem to be making a connection with using a URL rewrite and getting put in the supplemetal. I'm sure that my competitors used to do a url rewrite to put the title as the url and now they have changed it to just product number instead.

 

Need to ask all you Oscommerce store owners out there

 

a) If you are using Ultimate SEO contribution are most or all your pages in the supplemental?

 

B) If not using Ultimate SEO (i.e accesing your using using the normal /product_info.php?products_id=XXX , /index.php?cPath=XX) are all your pages in the normal Google Index?

[rommany]

I'm using Ultimate SEO and the first 24 pages of google is not supplemented and that's about how many pages i have, i have around 6000 page so most will be supplemented but that's because i have a name tool on my site and that repeats it self hundreds of time, but most important is that all my main pages are listed as normal.

 

Getting but to the topic, I'm listed in google.co.uk on the first page for around 2000 keywords and that's for major keywords not just the obscure ones and .com I'm on the second and third pages and for a few keywords, I'm also on the .com first page a few times and i put that down to four main things, 1, Ultimate SEO contribution, 2, Header Tags contribution and my correct content and good links exchanging, so osC really does work.....

[Mythology]

Hi, thats my reply on another topic in this forum. i guess this reply also fits this topic: So take a look at it:

 

 

i am indexed by google when i add a SEO URL contribution on my web. in a few hours. it had crawled over m site a few times when i give place a sponsoredlink to adwords, but i wasn't listed top on sarches.

 

Now i'm about to add an inline frame of 0 px to 0 px html page which has all my products with buy word before and after them. I think it will make a difference.

 

 

also if the higher amount of links makes the site on top of google searches; i will also have an invisible link to google search result page i am wondering if the crawler will take it or not :=)

 

Hey; do not search for a clean toplist; give an invisible link to: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=insomnia .)

 

That's an idea. Hope works