Onpage SEO - Just something I experienced
- SEO |
The site ranked insane poor for the post titles, not even in top 500 most of the time, despite link building. My "best..." and ".... reviews" keywords ranked way better, often at page one, but the post titles nowhere to be seen.
This is how the posts were setup, in the correct order from top to bottom:
- Image that hyperlinked to Amazon
- 300 words of content
- Image that hyperlinked to Amazon
- Buy now button that hyperlinked to Amazon
- Amazon reviews in an iFrame
- Product image gallery with many images that linked like this:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/sample-image.jpg
When you click on that link you don't end up on Amazon but the image enlarged in some sort of popup screen.
This whole theme/setup started to annoy me BIG TIME.
So here's what I did, one step at a time with 1-2 weeks in between each time
- Removed the link from the 1st image as that's the first thing Google crawled on the page, which doesn't seem to smart to me. Result: Nothing happened
- Disabled the reviews that were pulled from Amazon (iframe stuff). Result: Nothing happened
- Installed a cloaking script that hides the affiliate links for Google based on user-agent but does show them to the visitor: Result: Again nothing happened
So by now the page looked like this:
- image
- 300 word article
- image (removed hyper link there as well)
- buy now button
- product image gallery with tons of those exc-images-amazon links (not sure if the cloaking script covered those btw)
Maybe 1 or 2 pages did pop up in top 100, but nothing huge really, as most still not in top 500.
I tried to get remove the product image gallery but no matter what I did or how deep I went into the php files and such, my whole theme got stuck and site showed a white screen, I just couldn't get rid of it.
So I said screw it, I just disable this whole amazon plugin that pulls the data from Amazon
Result: My whole site got messed up and didn't even show the post loop on homepage or category level anymore.
At this point I was completely done with it and removed the theme + plugins + cloaking script + everything, installed a new theme, did a ton of editing to fit my style and optimized it properly for SEO.
Result: ALL of the product pages now rank in the top 30.
I don't know if its the theme or the plugin that messes things up for Google or that the product gallery was the evil part of all of it, but I'm glad I got rid of it and will never ever use Amazon themes / plugin type of things EVER again.
If you plan to build an Amazon site, just pick a nice theme and forget about all those fancy Amazon plugins and whatever, just build a clean site. For Amazon sites I would also get rid of category / homepages that contain those read more snippets. Better keep every page 100% unique and use a static homepage and make the categories static as well. Just works better, some might disagree and that's ok.
Just got back from a #BrightonSEO. I was given room 404 in the hotel I stayed at. Couldnât find it anywhere!
Just got back from a #BrightonSEO. I was given room 404 in the hotel I stayed at. Couldnât find it anywhere!
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