Frustrated

[Tiffany]

I would really appreciate some help. I've been working on my site optimisation slowly over the last few months and did seem to be getting somewhere slowly!

I'm no sure what its called but when I typed in my shop name for google uk there were 4 different options to select underneath - this happened after about 4 months. Also one of my categories was on page 1 of google (and still is) but two other categories had also crept up to page 1.

I recently had my whole site updated to the latest version and it was down for several hours for maintenance. Since then the different options to select under my store name have disappeared and although I am still on page 1 for one categorey the other 2 have disappeared way down to page 3 or 4 on google.

I am finding this very disheartening.......I know that google crawled my site when it was down for maintenance as when I go into webmaster it tells me so. however it has also crawled since then and there is still no change.

The other thing I have noticed is that one of my competitor has put my site name into their webshop as a category for customers to select! Also they have changed their meta title to included part of my site name - could this have had an effect on our site rankings? The competitors site is higher ranked than ours.

Help appreciated on where I should go from here ....I am determined to get to page 1 of google for as many of my categories as possible but its hard and when something like this happens ...knockbacks can be even tougher!

 

[Simon-M]

If your name is unique and you are the only one in your field that uses it then you can ask google to intervene and have the other site removed from google for using your copyright material. If you file a DMCA with google they will make sure that your competitor gets removed or changes their site so that they no longer use your name.

Simon

 

[nickpp]

Lots of things effect the way google indexes your site. If the site uses php do you have a rewrite rule enable to convert the home.php?id=23434 type of page to a more meaningful description of the product page , like www.yoursite.co.uk/sports_shoes.php

This is such a huge issue and one we have come up against in the past, there are simplly so many factors that determine your rankings: content, site structure, page rank, quality inbound links and page names and relevant content.

Pm if you need any help

regards

nick

 

[davidjgoss87]

The links to sub-pages underneath your main entry in Google are called sitelinks, and are totally automated. You'd have to ask an SEO person how best to try to get these up again, but I imagine having a sitemap (and submitting it to Google) and optimising the pages you would want to be there would help.

Like someone said earlier, you may be able to do various things to stop your competitor from using your site name like that. Although, to save hassle, try sending a polite "play nicely" email to them along the lines of "in the interests of fairness I'd appreciate it if you could remove..." and maybe set a deadline after which you will pursue it with authorities or whoever. It might work, it might not, but you may as well try.

Unfortunately, Google change how they index and rank pages every so often to keep everybody on their toes, so you might want to keep an eye out on SEO forums and newsletters to find out what is going on and try to adapt.

 

[alphaseocompany]

whats your domain name?

 

[CompleteTrainer]

one of my competitor has put my site name into their webshop as a category for customers to select

I would email your competitors and say you are seeking legal advice. Let them know you are aware of what they are doing and are taking it seriously. Let Google know - that's very good advice too. Whether you go legal or not depends on a number of factors, not the least of which is it worth it. But don't let them think you haven't noticed!

CT

 

[youbetcha1018]

If your name is unique and you are the only one in your field that uses it then you can ask google to intervene and have the other site removed from google for using your copyright material. If you file a DMCA with google they will make sure that your competitor gets removed or changes their site so that they no longer use your name.

Simon

Agreed. If you will not make immediate action, you will make consumers a bit confused and might loose them. Good Luck!

 

[awebapart.com]

I recently had my whole site updated to the latest version and it was down for several hours for maintenance. Since then the different options to select under my store name have disappeared and although I am still on page 1 for one categorey the other 2 have disappeared way down to page 3 or 4 on google.

You do have some odd things on your site, which may have appeared with the latest update, and which may affect your rankings:

1. the sitemap.xml file (if this is the one you are using) in your root directory seems to have some wrong URLs in it (e.g. the second url is http:// www. domain.co.uk/https:// www. domain.co.uk/index.php?main_page=login), most of the priorities are set to 0, and it says you only have about 20 product pages when you clearly have a lot more. Having a bad sitemap file can be detrimental to your rankings, as was recently discussed in the sitemaps are evil thread.

2. It looks like some of your links on your main page, e.g. sizes, customer comments go off to https pages rather than http - I'm not sure whether this is intentional, or something that changed with the last release, but it also seems odd (although probably minor compared to 1).

I recomend you have a look at your sitemap file first.