Upgraded 7.0 to Gold 10 - New Products don't rank in Google

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xplosi0n1
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Upgraded 7.0 to Gold 10 - New Products don't rank in Google

Post by xplosi0n1 » Mon Oct 26, 2015 8:48 am

Hello all,

We recently upgraded from 7.0 to Gold R10 and our products from the old build are ranking on the 1st or 2nd page of Google and always have. Since our rebuild every product that we have added to the site is not able to be found (we have only looked until the 15 pages), we can locate our products on Google but only by adding our company name to the beginning of the search query.

We have had 2 different companies look at our site and no one can figure out why this is happening.

We do have our sitemap working and we have submitted our site to be crawled by Google using webmaster tools.

Our site is CheapBowlingBalls.com

Any help would be greatly appreciated as we are getting less than 1/2 the orders now than before the relaunch.
Thanks,
Mike

CheapBowlingBalls.com
3204 Woodman Drive
Kettering, OH 45420
937.559.1541
mikeh@cheapbowlingballs.com
www.cheapbowlingballs.com

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Re: Upgraded 7.0 to Gold 10 - New Products don't rank in Google

Post by Shopping Cart Admin » Mon Oct 26, 2015 11:32 am

Hello,

Google doesn't run it's re-ranking very often so new products being added not showing up in Google isn't a surprise. I would recommend checking google analytic s to see what percentage of your users are surfing in on mobile devices. Google is holding down pages that don't pass their mobile test in searches from people with mobile devices. This could very well be the issue with sales.

If these new pages are alone in the dark, with no social media pointing to them, no blog entries pointing to them, etc. It can take forever as Google is using this a lot more now days as well. They may eventually go up as a result of your websites natural ranking, but without some outside influence it can take time.

Google webmaster tools can provide a insight into your site as well. Gold is far better optimized for search engines, so I would understand why 2 different companies looked at your site and couldn't figure it out.

Do you know why all of the products have ?C=426 added to the URL, I wouldn't normally expect to see this.
Thanks for your support

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Re: Upgraded 7.0 to Gold 10 - New Products don't rank in Google

Post by xplosi0n1 » Mon Oct 26, 2015 11:50 am

Admin,

The products were are not seeing were uploaded in July. We have posted links on FB, Pinterest, YouTube, etc. We always do this right when we add them.

We do have a mobile friendly page according to Google.

When we added a product to Able 7 it showed up on page 1 or 2 the next day. There are not very many other good bowling site out there and they are displaying new balls that the info was released from the manufacture on Friday, and they are already displaying results.

Our category pages are working awesome even beating out most of our competitors actual product pages but something is definitely wrong with our product pages.

Here is what we changed with the upgrade
We used to have just 1 category - Bowling Balls then we had all the manufactures listed under that category. Now we have 3 different categories for bowling balls; Manufactures, Performance Level and Oil Volume. Each bowling ball is in all 3 categories.

We also added attribute pop ups for Weight, Drilling Protection, and Ext Warranty's. Sometimes these are being displayed by Google as part of the Meta Descriptions (only when we use the Meta Description box) now I have switched to only using the HTML Head section to correct this.

We also added tabs to the product page for Tech Data, Videos, Drilling Instructions and Reviews. Before this info was all inline on the page.

Is it possible that there is some messed up code on our Product Details Page that is affecting us on Google?
Thanks,
Mike

CheapBowlingBalls.com
3204 Woodman Drive
Kettering, OH 45420
937.559.1541
mikeh@cheapbowlingballs.com
www.cheapbowlingballs.com

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Re: Upgraded 7.0 to Gold 10 - New Products don't rank in Google

Post by xplosi0n1 » Mon Oct 26, 2015 11:55 am

As for the ?C=426 at the end of the pages. Im not sure what that is like that. our last site was like that also.

Should it be removed? How would you do that?

Also, I have been making custom URLs for all our new products that shouldn't be affecting anything with google correct.

Here is the new product added on Friday and the search results showing our competitors results. I couldn't find us on the 1st 10 pages.

http://www.cheapbowlingballs.com/Hammer ... aspx?C=381

https://www.google.com/search?q=hammer+ ... 3&ie=UTF-8
Thanks,
Mike

CheapBowlingBalls.com
3204 Woodman Drive
Kettering, OH 45420
937.559.1541
mikeh@cheapbowlingballs.com
www.cheapbowlingballs.com

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Re: Upgraded 7.0 to Gold 10 - New Products don't rank in Google

Post by Shopping Cart Admin » Mon Oct 26, 2015 12:09 pm

Hello,

I'm running a test using Raven to see if anything pops out on your website. This will take several hours.
Thanks for your support

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Re: Upgraded 7.0 to Gold 10 - New Products don't rank in Google

Post by xplosi0n1 » Mon Oct 26, 2015 12:16 pm

Awesome, Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Mike

CheapBowlingBalls.com
3204 Woodman Drive
Kettering, OH 45420
937.559.1541
mikeh@cheapbowlingballs.com
www.cheapbowlingballs.com

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Re: Upgraded 7.0 to Gold 10 - New Products don't rank in Google

Post by Katie » Mon Oct 26, 2015 12:39 pm

When did you upgrade to Gold? I think that the new products not indexing in Google and sales being down are two different issues.

If I search on "spare ball holder", you are ranked 2nd (if you exclude Amazon). I even checked on my Iphone, using the same search terms, and your mobile version of the product is ranked 2nd.

It looks like you have some tough competition, but it didn't take me long to see that you also have a better price than bowling.com and Amazon. I would check to make sure there isn't some other problem.

Now, this is interesting....when I click "Add to Cart", I thought the basket was broken. I kept clicking Add to Cart waiting for something to happen. Then I clicked the View Cart link in the header and realized that I have 5 in my basket. This is really confusing. At a very minimum, I would show the number of items in the View Cart link. This is a built-in feature in Gold which has been removed.

I would recommend that you either bring the user directly to the basket page, or show the Mini-Basket so they can easily get to the checkout page.

Another technical issue that I've having is that I tested by creating a new account using the One Page Checkout. I checked the box to create an account. Then I clicked the button to ship to Multiple Destinations and I was brought back to a login page. Wait what?? This really makes no sense and someone has modified the checkout page so it is not functioning like I would expect it to. Also, when I tried to login with the account that I thought I just created, it didn't work. That must be extremely confusing for new users.

I would suggest that you spend some time using the checkout system and try to identify any potential technical problems. Checkout as a new unregistered user and also as a registered user. Try all the available features like Coupons, Editing, etc. Make sure the payment options are working too!

Also, you should check the Abandoned Baskets report from the Admin side. Here is a link to the documentation so you can easily find it -
http://help.ablecommerce.com/mergedProj ... eports.htm

This might help you recover some sales because there is a button you can use to send an alert the customer. But do the testing on the checkout pages first. I'm not a big fan of the OPC, but our stock version works much different than the one I see on your website. The step-by-step checkout system is a little more fool-proof.

I'm not sure who did the custom work on this site, but you need to contact them right away and explain that the checkout is broken for users who are trying to register a new account.

Please keep us updated and let us know if you have any questions.

Thanks
Katie
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Re: Upgraded 7.0 to Gold 10 - New Products don't rank in Google

Post by mike92117 » Mon Oct 26, 2015 2:12 pm

Nice mega menu!

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Re: Upgraded 7.0 to Gold 10 - New Products don't rank in Google

Post by xplosi0n1 » Mon Oct 26, 2015 3:40 pm

Katie,

Thanks for the insight. We relaunched in Mid July.

We are only having a problem finding items that we have added to the site since the relaunch. The item you found we have had for years.

Just for fun try to find a recent item we just added a month ago, this is how every item is that we have added since July.

Storm Lock Bowling Ball - http://www.cheapbowlingballs.com/Storm- ... -Ball.aspx

I will definitely look into the mini cart popping up when an item is added to the cart. We have about 95% of our items offering upsell items so the customer is usually redirected to that page which also makes the mini cart pop up.

We did not notice that the checkout is broken I will address that right away. Our site was done by Sandcastle Interactive an AbleCommerce development partner.

Is there another company that you recommend would do a better more complete job?

We do use the abandoned shopping cart feature daily but i guess if they cannot checkout it wont work huh.

Thanks again for the support,
Mike
Thanks,
Mike

CheapBowlingBalls.com
3204 Woodman Drive
Kettering, OH 45420
937.559.1541
mikeh@cheapbowlingballs.com
www.cheapbowlingballs.com

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Re: Upgraded 7.0 to Gold 10 - New Products don't rank in Google

Post by Katie » Tue Oct 27, 2015 4:35 am

Hi Mike,

To get your checkout working again, I would recommend that you disable the One Page Checkout. It is a setting on the Configure > Store > General page.

Then I would work with your developer to fix any problems that they may have inadvertently created by the customization. This is a very complicated page, and any changes need to be well tested. Sandcastle is most familiar with the changes on this page, and it can be hard for another developer to come in after someone else.

You should probably discuss the proposed change and these issues with Sandcastle as soon as possible.

Thanks,
Katie
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