Does Google hate website templates?

Well, as far as Google goes, the theme (what you visually see) makes no different to them.

The code on the other hand does to a point.
They are not going to compare code from site to site.

But from an SEO standpoint it does need to be semantically correct.
It should also be valid code and too standards.

As for design and sales, its absolutely a big point in sales. That is your label so to say.
People are visual buyers, give them a good professional visual to look at and they will be half way there before they start reading anything on the site. Simply because it gave them a good visual.

This does not mean on a graphical stand point having all kinds of images, it just has to look good and professional.

If your traffic is not relevant, it has nothing to do with the design, it is your key words and content. This information can be found using Google Analytics and see what searches are bringing people to your site.

Well that is going to depend on a few things.
1. how much you currently know about coding
2. what type of system it is on (static HTML pages or a CMS)
3. how bad the code is.

The difference is experience, for instance, I have 5 years in web programming.
I read code just about as good as English and I am an American English native .

So the result is how fast you want to get it done and how much time you want to invest in doing it yourself.

I guess one thing would be to point out the site so we can have a look and give you some better advice. Is it the one in your signature?

If it is, I wouldn't touch the SEO to much.
Eco-friendly dog beds
Brings you up 4th on the page on Google, not counting ads..

Anita,

I see you have done a lot of work on this niche (green dog beds, eco-friendly dog beds) but problem to me is that very few people search for 'green dog beds' (5/day exact, 13 broad) or 'eco-friendly dog beds' (0). And those looking for 'green' might just be concerned about the color! Despite what folks say, we have some way to go before eco-friendly enters our common lingo. Your low sales are just due to very low traffic, and consequently lower conversions.

You are really up against the very competitive 'dog bed' (8,000+/day exact) and 'dog beds' (6,600+/day exact) with some very strong competitors out there.

You could improve your SEO by adding your keywords to <description> and your page <h1> tag, the latter having been done on some pages, but you are up against the main problem I believe of not having good keywords to start with.

Site-wise I think the shopping cart front-end can put off many, and although you have loads of useful info, I didn't see any testimonials or reviews that people like to see. I am no dog-lover but you could check Amazon for same and see what folks say there. Ask some real customers to write some reviews/feedback.

I think that web design advisor is just looking for work. Yes, a more professional site can catch more business, but your template is not that bad. The images in banner are a little fuzzy, but he is just looking for work and talking some BS. You need more site visitors. Google needs more rich and targeted content on your main pages in addition to shopping cart items.

And given a couple more years online your domain age will improve significantly, another Google plus. Currently too young. Nothing to do here but wait (and get on with your other niche sites). Another couple of years will also gain more 'eco-friendly/green aware searches. Hang in there and get those testimonials.

Hope that helps.

No Google does not hate templates.

Some CMS systems that use templates are not search friendly but that has nothing to do with the template and has more to do with the CMS system and the way the content is displayed (often using javascript) than the template.

No, I think what google hates is useless minisites that offer no unique content, which have "similiar templates" to many other useless minisites.


I really do not think a template will make your site banned, but there are some common minisite templates that are often banned for duplicate content, etc.

Well, in my experience, Google hates anything not playing by w3 rules of document standards which includes the code and style sheet. Google also tends to hate Iframes and missing alt tags for images.

As far as design goes, there are many super scary looking banner farms out there that rank very high in results, take any site offering free css templates for example, then there's sites that convert but are hideous even with out the banners, like a lot of squeeze pages for example. Usually any cms or downloaded template will already be seo friendly but the ones that are will usually let it be known from the get go, so idk.

But your site looks professional enough to me, just make sure your images have the alt tags, scripts and cms should already do this but you would be surprised how much stuff out there needs to be hacked and tweaked even if you paid good money for it. If you want to learn quickly by practicing go to w3 schools.com, they cover all the essentials.

Nice site and hope this helps you out, wish you success, peace.

i ahve noticed that when i put the exact auto blog contentins two different sites.. the one with custom design (or rather the code fo rthe robot) gets higher ranking... while the off-the-shelf template wordpress (so called SEO optimized) gets 0 to no organic visitors. even theough the wordpress seo optimized auto engine has more content and archives all auto blog content.

the one that does get traffic is basically a self coded php page with 0 images and the design is just functional so its easy to get the things we want is all.
i dont know the real reason, i doubt anyone can say this for sure. but i assume a custom site (as analysed by its code, signature and assets) will get more robot attention than a run-o-teh-mill template site. at least until you can churn out oodles of unique content.

but then again.. this is all just hypothetical. If any company would tell ME they know that google like "their" deisng as opposed to mine.. i would laugh first, then ask them to tell me why.

well it depend on the theme which you are selling whether its keywords are written on the front page or back page

Templates are fine as long as the codes are written in compliance with the W3C standards. But a professional looking site definitely counts because they look reliable and speaks for the product itself.

Your website represents your store it is where you welcome your clients and make them feel comfortable. You yourself wont stay or purchase something in a physical store that looks like it was built overnight even if they have great looking or branded stuff on their shelves. You'll have second thoughts if the ones on their shelves are legit or knock off products.

Google hates 2 things for sure, duplication and poor codes. If your web template is a too common one, then there might be nothing unique about your website, which could probably affect your sales level. Get a coder to look at the codes & clean up if required.

Anita,

There's some good advice in the responses so far...

The HTML coding needs to be "right" for best results not only with Google, but across different browsers - some browsers (or versions of browsers like, IE 6 vs IE 7 vs FireFox) will let you "get away" with some things, and not others, resulting in an inconsistent display of your web site to your visitors.

Most likely the comments from the design firm were to get you to buy their services - here's an idea, without warning, put them on the spot and ask them for two examples.

If you want to learn HTML, there are tons of free resources - search for html tutorial, but here's one option to start:

HTML Tutorial

Web standards (all the programming rules) are defined by an organization called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

They have all the technical definitions, etc. available if you want to really get down and dirty, but I would probably recommend waiting until later for that so you don't get overwhelmed.

One thing you CAN do with W3C immediately is to check their HTML validator. It checks your page for errors.

The W3C Markup Validation Service

You enter your web site address in the Validate by URI field and click "Check". It will list the syntax errors it finds.

NOTE: Many times, you'll see tons of errors, but fixing one of the first ones "fixes" several others - always start from the top down!

Your site lists several errors, but IMHO, none of them are "major" (just a quick scan). Yes, they are errors, but I don't believe that's causing you lost sales.

Remember this: You have to have traffic to get sales.

If your traffic is low, it could be a low-volume market, it could be you don't rank well, etc. - that's the question at hand.

If you are GETTING traffic but not buyers, it's a conversion problem - are you getting non-targeted traffic (people looking for human beds but end up on a pet beds web site) or are you getting the right people but the price is too high?

There could obviously be tons of other reasons for low conversions but understand you are asking a question about web site structure from a technical perspective which wouldn't DIRECTLY impact sales.

It could absolutely impact your search engine positions, and if it doesn't display properly in a visitor's browser, then they will likely not buy.

Just don't confuse the technical and therefore search engine results with the conversion of visitors.

Hope it helps!

Gary

BTW - the navigation down the left side is (IMHO) really hard to read - the colors are so close that there's no contrast. :-)

who told you the same? Google don't do anything like that

apparently, google did not hate it

I am brand new here, but I agree that Google's problem is not with your general coding. But it likely does not like the errors. So try to figure out the first three on your own. And you can do this! If you don't understand the error message open a browser window and paste the error message into Google and search for it. This is how I learned to solve unknown and unexplained errors for myself. Eg. Search on:

document type does not allow element "LINK" here This is error one.
duplicate specification of attribute "BGCOLOR" This is error two.
there is no attribute "TOPMARGIN" This is error three.

After you do a search you will find others that have the same problem and you can read what people told them to do, check, fix. They will then ask more questions or add info and people will answer them or ask them more. This is how you can easily learn with out having to ask, wait, and ask or answer more. In one sitting you can fix problems instead of days waiting for answers.

Note that on the error listing page from WC3 for your page errors it lists a line # and column #. Read the error statement. Especially the first line where it shows your code and puts your error in Red. For example, on the third error it lists Line 13 col 117. If you open your main page in some web page creation tool you will be shown line numbers on the far left. View the line. Find the error and fix it. Run the check again and see if it is gone. You will get a good feel for the errors after a while.

If you have dreamweaver or frontpage have it run its validation tool and it will show you many errors there as well.

Also, I second the color choices for your left navigation section.

A better Main text color?
A better second text color?
A better third text color?

Regardless, you really want to get rid of that light green. Hurts the eyes and may be very very hard to read for some. Which results in your page not feeling as professional as you want to come off to the visitor. If My eyes hurt at a website I will leave with out checking things out much at all.

Hopes this adds to your help.

Peace and BLessings

WTH? I'm all for coding clean and to standards, but to say that Google cares one lick whether your code resembles standards created by the W3C is not based on any facts or research.

Google does not care what the "quality" of your code is like. Not even a little bit. The reason is that the vast majority of websites on the internet do not validate, many among them the greatest and most innovative sites ever created. It would be foolhardy of Google (or any search engine) to raise an artificial bar which pressures sites to do something which is not actually better for users.

Standards are in place so that other developers can approach code that is written by you. If you code to standards, your code will be more readable and maintainable in the future. That is all. To pretend there is any sort of "SEO" benefit is laughable.

After all, even google.com doesn't validate....

Not is wrong with template cause i use them all the time.
The thing you may need to work on is the html and seo factor of the template.

Based on my own experience, I feel that a website template does not effect search results in a negative way. One of my sites has been built with my web hosts site builder tool and I have ranked #1 and other positions on the first page for different key phrases that I have purposefully target. I usually use a free tool to check my page and make it as SEO friendly as possible. I also don't believe that one page sites get docked by Google in a negative way. I have one that is only one page and ranked 3 right away on the key phrase I was targeting, beating out other folks in the same category that have been there for a long time. I think it's all about good content and good code.

I know this thread has been wrapped up but...

Thinking about it logically, if Google hated templates it would reject around 90% of internet content. Templates are everywhere.

I don't think so Google hate website templates

Google only doesn't like those websites that has nothing new to offer and have appreciably similar templates as other websites templates on web.