It's my first post and I want to thank everyone for all the great tips that I've read over time on the boards! Anyway, I have a question regarding Google and the head-tags that are running in our store.

Recently, I believe that we added information in the header tags, that we did not have before. To be honest, I believe we had kept that field blank for ages, not wanting to tamper with the spidering success that we've had. It applies the information to each and every page, about 800 different product pages. Our positioning on Google, which had been outstanding for years, has plummeted. I'm not certain as to why, but I believe I have an idea, so that's what I'm asking...

Here's the overall tag that seems to be affecting every page:

<META Name="revisit-after" Content="30 Days">
<META Name="Description" Content="Pop culture store selling rubber ducks, bumper stickers, bobbleheads, and Care Bears.">


When I've gone through Google, our company's product names show up when looking at our site directly on google (ex: site:xyz.com), but the aforementioned text in the meta tag description field is the description for every single item now. So instead of the keyword matches relating to the product name, we just get the same text from the meta description for every product. Is this tag causing the search engine to now stop indexing the item description text and causing the problem of horrible search indexing?

Thanks,
Eric

Its a bit hard to know whats going on without seeing your site, but certainly the revisit after tag has nothing to do with anything, its not parsed by or acted on by search engines.

If you mean that your are using the same description on each page of your site, then that is a problem and it is not likely that your pages are well optimized if that is the case.

I would suggest that you put a link to your site in your profile so we can understand what you are saying better.

It's nothing to worry about. Google shows different descriptions depending on the keywords searched upon. Nobody searches for your site using site:yoursite.com except for you, so nobody will see that description you are seeing.

If you use the exact keyword phrases in your Meta description tag that your site ranks highly with, Google will show your Meta description info as your description. If you don't, they'll use a snippet of copy where you do have that phrase.

Recently, I believe that we added information in the header tags, that we did not have before. To be honest, I believe we had kept that field blank for ages, not wanting to tamper with the spidering success that we've had. It applies the information to each and every page, about 800 different product pages. Our positioning on Google, which had been outstanding for years, has plummeted. I'm not certain as to why, but I believe I have an idea, so that's what I'm asking...

Your problem is twofold: bad page design and a lack of reliable incoming links.

You need to get the site listed in one or more reputable directories (Yahoo!, DMOZ, JoeAnt, etc.).

But your HTML coding is about as far from optimized as you can get.

Each page needs to emphasize only a small set of keywords. Those keywords should be used in the title tag, description tag, keywords tag (if you're going to use one), an H1 header tag, some bolded text, and in one or two sentences in the main body text.

You're just throwing images at the search engine, stuffing the ALT= tags with text, and hoping for the best.

Well, you're seeing about the best you'll get under current circumstances (which may change).

Thanks for the responses. I've been through the replies and I've made the appropriate changes to the set up.

As for Michael, what you've said really isn't accurate for our company's site. We're listed in every major directory and have thousands of customers in from search engine traffic a day. I've actually identified the problem finally, and I certainly want to share it with everyone.

Our company recently switched our full operation to the Yahoo! RHTML based merchant site, so I've had the pleasure of reworking the system in order to get our links updated. We've had a miniture site of sorts working with them for about 5 years and 7 years on our own customized system.

Anyway, when doing some optimizing, Yahoo! has a customization area for the head-tags, which when I provided updated meta tag information, I failed to realize that the information was going to override the individual page information.

I'll give you an example of the latest Google search engine listing for a particular product:

The Scarface Bumper Sticker Decal
Pop culture store selling rubber ducks, bumper stickers, bobbleheads, and Care Bears.
store.ticklespop.com/scbustde.html - 15k - Cached - Similar pages

Thanks to essentially putting the master meta head-tag, it overrode how Google usually spiders the page, where it will proceed to grabbing the first two lines of the product text. This is what we usually see:

The Scarface Bumper Sticker Decal
It's the Scarface bumper sticker decal. Measuring 4"x3", post the movie poster look
store.ticklespop.com/scbustde.html - 15k - Cached - Similar pages

I appreciate all of the suggestions, and I hope that the above information will help anyone else using that Yahoo! based system to avoid making the same mistake.

Eric

Thanks for the responses. I've been through the replies and I've made the appropriate changes to the set up.

As for Michael, what you've said really isn't accurate for our company's site. We're listed in every major directory and have thousands of customers in from search engine traffic a day. I've actually identified the problem finally, and I certainly want to share it with everyone.

You may want to look at your directory listings, then:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=link:_QeLlNn6flcJ:www.ticklespop.com/

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=%22%2Bwww.ticklespop.%2Bcom%22

You are SERIOUSLY not visible in the Google index.

As for the meta tag being on every page, it is, in fact, only on the front page. The other pages (I only did a random sampling) showed nothing but an abbreviated title tag in the HEAD section.

Hi Michael,

Those META header tags were just deleted (the one that was appearing on all pages). I realize that those links are very poorly seen. What I was saying is that the Y! Merchant system does not do META tag lines for each product page, Google had been spidering through the text of the page on those pages to garner results.

Can I add META tag information before the html product text on the page (See Below-- I've done a product page where I've been able to generate individual product information)? That's the only place that I can have the ability to do so. All of the other fields that I have on our merchant end are special options fields such as for cross promotion of items, sizes, etc.

I want to make the point very clear, though, that our Google placement was extremely good before adding the META tag for the entire site. That example product, the Scarface Decal, was in the #1 position before adding that META tag for the site. Most of our products were in a #1-30 position (as they've been since the 90s) before that tag was added. I'm just trying to make a point that Google had been spidering well throughout the product pages and giving us positioning, however, improving the position is key, and that site wide META tag killled the last spider for us on Google.

I totally appreciate your help. You've been very kind!
Eric

---- I've gone into the HTML and created some META tag information:

You can see it on this page:
http://store.ticklespop.com/mukefrbustde.html

I hope you are right about easily fixing this problem with meta tags but I doubt that is the answer. It looks like you have plenty of links to your main domain, www.tickles.com, and lots of pages indexed at G. But most of your current content (cart) is on a different domain, www.ticklespop.com.
Look at a Google search --> site:www.tickles.com.
Then follow some of the results. And see the G cached data too. This is a mess. IMO the problem is related to stuff redirected/duplicated between these 2 domains that is almost certain to cause problems. Not knowing the history of what has been done it’s hard to say, but there are some problems here that still need to be dealt with. What’s wrong with using the old domain name? Why are there 2 domains? Is this a botched transition from one to domain to another? I didn't look, what kind of redirects are you using?

John,

Thanks for the reply. Let me outline the information:

Our main company site at www.tickles.com had been hosted with our own dedicated server using Miva Merchant for nearly the past 8 years. We had grown unhappy with the Miva product, although we highly customized it.

A sister site had run on Yahoo!'s Store for the past five years, which was ticklespop.com. It for quite some time was simply a "best-of" store on the Yahoo! Shopping Network, but then it became a full fledged version of our main company store.

So, when it was decided to simply merge all of our operations to the Yahoo! based merchant (because we simply were happier with the product), a few things happened.

Yahoo! made an error in the implimentation of transfering our main company domain, and name, tickles.com, over to the merchant services. The way that the Merchant store was set up, tickles.com traffic was to be routed directly to ticklespop.com, which is our store catalog. The error was that the tickles.com domain name was set up as it's own account in their web hosting system, not as a simple domain transfer as it was to be.

They had it incorrectly set up and not to bore you with the details, it has to remain in place, as is. So, if an individual goes to the www.tickles.com index page, it's a main menu of sorts that allows you to enter the store. It is not a redirect, which is actually good for our indexing purposes.

The duplication that you see is because we actually had TWO different store systems running on the two different domain names as I listed above. Most of the spiders have not gone back through and reindexed tickles.com, which simply brings all of the outdated pages to our custom error page, which is simply the www.tickles.com entrance page.

Once everything is reindexed by the engines, we won't have the duplication of product pages because the only product pages are found on the ticklespop.com domain. It is a bit confusing because we actually had two distinct company sites.

When we finish some further updating to the store, the tickles.com domain name will contain more information for our customers, but no product catalog, which is fine. Essentially, our company TICKLES.com's store is at ticklespop.com now due to the set up. Our customer's have been fine with the transition and I hope that all the duplication makes sense now, it certainly seems crazy until it is explained.

You're absolutely right that what was our old company main site had very good search engine indexing over the long haul and tinkering with what is our new full site at the ticklespop.com brought forth the meta-tag problem that I saw with the original question.

Thanks,
Eric

I agree with JohnW on this one. You have a real mess on your hands. You need to decide to make some serious content/domain changes and just bite the bullet. You need to clean up the situation and get the content sorted out.

It's unfortunate that this happened while Google was rolling out a major update. That probably had something to do with what happened to your listings.

The only meta tag that will really help you is the DESCRIPTION tag. It will be used by some search engines to provide an abbreviated description of page content if it seems relevant. Meta tags can ONLY be properly placed in the HEAD section.

The TITLE tag (which I don't include in meta tags, but others do) is vital to any page, and should accurately describe the page's content.

If Yahoo! won't let you adjust these tags on a per page basis, my advice would be to find a new vendor regardless of what the immediate cost. You need to be able to customize your title tags.

Barring the ability to insert meta tags on a page-by-page basis, I would offer a concise description near the body tag (in human-readable text).