There seems to be something obvious stopping our product pages from being listed in organic results - help!

[ethicalcommunity]

Hello All

Firstly new to SEO MOZ but what a fantastic resource, good work!

I help run a platform at ethical community (dot) com (have phrased it like that so google doesn't pick up this thread hope thats ok).

We seem to have something glaringly obvious with the SEO ability of our product pages. We now have over 7000 products on the site and would like to think we have done a pretty good job in terms of optimisning them, lots of nice keywords, relevant page titles, good internal links, and even recently have reduced the loading speeds a fair amount. We have a sitemap set up feeding in URLS to Google and some of them are now nearly a year old.

The problem, when doing an EXACT google search on a product title the product pages dont show up for the majority of the 7000 products.

HOWEVER.... we get fantastic ranking in google products, and get sales through other areas of the site, which seems even more odd. For example, if you type in "segway" you'll see us ranking on the first page of google in google products, but the product page itself is nowhere to be seen.

For example "DARK CHOCOLATE STRANDS 70G CAKE DECORATION" gets no results on google (aside from google products) when we have this page at OURDOMAIN/eco-shop/food/dark-chocolate-strands-70g-cake-decoration-5592

Can anyone help identify if there is a major bottleneck here our gut feeling is there is one major factor that is causing this.

[ethicalcommunity]

Can stephen/anyone else help with my latest question here?

[ethicalcommunity]

HI Stephen did you manage to look into that new example I gave any further?

[ethicalcommunity]

Thanks for this Stephen - very helpful.

Ajax wise we made some amendments last week which seem to already be having an impact (our pagination on search results had /# links and now they have crawlable urls). Google has already crawled more pages so far. We are going to move away from the ajax search altogether in the next few weeks too.

One thing that still bugs us all is this example: http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=CEBRA+RHASSOUL+ORGANIC+MOROCCAN+LAVA+CLAY  This bugs the hell out of us because

a) The product page for this (http://www.ethicalcommunity.com/eco-shop/toiletries-and-cosmetics/cebra-rhassoul-organic-moroccan-lava-clay-8206) IS in the our sitemap 
b) It features on our homepage (has done for 1 week at least) so in theory google should have crawled this link by now 
c) We get a huge amount of traffic (well, relative, but about 40% of total traffic on sunday) for the term RHASSOUL CLAY. What's annoying is this links to a content piece on the clay but the product itself is nowhere to be seen.

Even googling an exact URL to the product page returns nothing, so if google does know about it, its blocking it.

This also would tend to perhaps invalidate the theory that its the search causing all of this problem as actually this product has accessible links from the homepage.

I have a feeling solving this one case would solve the issue for most of the other products on the site.

Any ideas here?

[firstconversion]

I think that navigation issues may well be what trip you up.

http://www.ethicalcommunity.com/eco-shop/buy/Food-and-Drink when I navigate through the product pages, I am not seeing the html changing to reflect the new contents, the html reflects the coffee content of the first page

However when I copy+paste the url directly to page 3 I get the correct html for the products on the page

Ajax isnt my strong point, but you need to aim to give engines access to your products via clear categorisation and pagination. Has your developer considered using a hashbang (#!)?

Here's a SEOmoz post that may help http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-allow-google-to-crawl-ajax-content

Let me know if this is the issue, interested to know

S

[ethicalcommunity]

thanks will do and look forward to it Stephen

[firstconversion]

check your ajax and what happens to your html when your products load. will look more later

[ethicalcommunity]

Also!...

5. You touched on slow loading speeds, can you give me something quantifiable here as as far as we know these should be fairly competitive and have run various speeds tests and they seem to come out ok in terms of loading time. Can you back up that statement with some more solidity? Many thanks again

[ethicalcommunity]

RE: 3)..... perhaps I misunderstood here but maybe what you meant by duplicate content was a lot of the content on the pages is "re-used" stuff for example

ETHICAL CREDENTIALS

Click the icons below to learn about this product's ethical credentials.

etc......

is that more what you meant rather than the product descriptions being copied/pasted from other shop site (as only some of the descriptions will be copy/paste jobs)

4. Benchmark...

http://www.etsy.com/listing/70625156/waving-leaves-crisp-white-and-lime-green?ref=fp_treasury_2 is a huge benchmark for us in terms of high volume optimised pages (and a similar model to us so one to review for sure). I guess if you break down the elements on that page a lot of the content are individual to the page... is this what you mean?

[ethicalcommunity]

Hi Stephen

Thank you for your feedback here...

1. Stripping the pages down. Thanks for this and a valid comment here, will get our developer to look into what we can strip out to put more focus on the content.

2. That server would appear to be from Woopra which as you may know is a live tracking tool for us to see live site action/pathway analysis etc. We use it quite a lot and have not heard that this could impact the site, do you know otherwise?

3. Duplicate content, I wouldnt say the majority of pages are duplicated, of course some sellers have their own product pages and copy/paste into ours but a lot of them also write them fresh. Even the ones that are writing them fresh are no-where to be seen

I personally think there is another factor influencing this as it still doesnt explain why some of the pages dont come up literally at all with an exact product search (even when searching the URLs)

look forward to hearing further thoughts and thanks again for your time on this.

[firstconversion]

http://www.ethicalcommunity.com/eco-shop/coffee/papua-new-guinean-coffee-454g-10261

All these coffee pages look like crappy duplicate content - you have such a tiny percentage of actual content product description vs all the other stuff on the page - on product pages strip out all the extraneous crap and just focus on selling your product

Also the site is very slow for me, run yslow/google page speed optimiser and see what you can improve

Also check woopra-ns.com