If you find that your traffic from Google is falling off precipitously, pages in your web site may be getting moved in to Google’s supplemental result index. Google’s Supplemental Results is a secondary database that Google uses to park pages that it feels may not meet its standards. These pages rarely–if ever–show up in search results. There is a wide range of reasons that Google uses to weed out individual pages that it does not deem to be worthy of placement on its search results pages.
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Web site performance, page loading and rendering is one of the first impressions a user observes when visiting a web site. Fast web pages appear much more professional. Web pages that load slowly, especially if the pages take 5 or more seconds to load, cause users to abandon a site pretty quickly. Think about it. How many web sites would you continue to visit if each page takes 5, 10 or more seconds or more for each page to load. There are steps that you can take to assure that your web site performs well and helps to retain users.
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Google has probably captured more information about you, me and everyone on this planet through their indexing of literally billions of web pages. Many of these web page contain names, addresses, phone numbers and probably a lot of information that we would not like to see made available. This huge collection of information can be used to verify names and addresses of customers when you suspect an order may be fraudulent.
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There is a little-known Web design problem that can prevent search engine spiders from finding the content on Web pages. It’s called excessive table nesting and the problem is more common than most site owners think.
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Every on-line merchant needs to develop a list of transaction issues that should trigger deeper scrutiny of an order. Let’s face it, due to the anonymity of the Internet e-commerce fraud hits almost every merchant to one degree or another. Even if a credit card company approves a card as valid, if the card is later found to be stolen or the card owner claims he or she did not order a product, the online merchant most often gets hit with a chargeback and must absorb the loss.
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eBay is by far the world’s largest online auction site. If you sell products on the Web and are not also selling products on eBay, you may be missing an opportunity. eBay is a great place to test market products and perform price point studies on new product to see what people are willing to pay for items. eBay is also a great place to sell obsolete or returned merchandise that can not be returned to the manufacturer or distributor. And it is, of course, a primary market for tens of thousands of merchants.
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MSN is the number three search engine and trails a long way behind Google and Yahoo. Nonetheless, it can drive a substantial amount of traffic to your web site and should not be ignored. The following links provide valuable tools, insight and information to help you utilize MSN more effectively.
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This article describes a search engine optimization technique known as cloaking. While there are some legitimate uses for this technique, search engines consider cloaking to be an unethical practice, because the technique can be used to artificially boost a site’s rankings in search engines. The use of cloaking, or a technique that is mistaken for cloaking, will likely get a site banned (completely removed) from a search engine database if the technique is detected.
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Yahoo is the number two search engine. While Google continues to dominate and drives most of the traffic on the Internet, Yahoo is preferred by many users. The following links provide tips, marketing tools and useful information that can help a site owner utilize Yahoo’s search services more effectively.
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The robots.txt file, also known as the robots exclusion file, is probably the best way to protect specific files and directories from being indexed by search engines. Why would you want to do this? To prevent certain Web pages, images or other Web objects from being added to a search engine’s database.
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