2 replies to this topic

[greggb]

Hmm, I was coming to somewhat different conclusions about MSN and stopped by the forum to check my assumptions. I am reviewing a real estate site that is nowhere to be found in Google and Yahoo, but that ranks pretty well in MSN. The site has a PR3 (not many quality links), but the keywords aren't very competitive, and it seemed like it should show up somewhere in Google or Yahoo. The biggest limiting factor I can find is the site was built in such a way that only the home page has been indexed (interior pages are framed). My guess is that Google and Yahoo filter out 1-page sites (or penalize them - whatever term you want to use), but that MSN weighs on-page factors heavily and doesn't give much weight to the number of pages. Whaddya think?

I recently converted a few e-commerce websites from OS Commerce to my own e-commerce software, and I've seen tremendous changes at MSN as a result. The main difference between OS Commerce and my software is that my software sets up a directory-like structure for the products. Let's say 30 different category pages in shtml, and 80 product pages in shtml. Just like that the websites went from nobodies to #1 at MSN.

Part of that might be the way OS Commerce uses session ids in their linking; I don't know.

I had a similar experience when I converted an auction website from Cold Fusion to SHTML with PERL as the dynamic language. The category pages are all SHTML now, and the items are displayed with a CGI script. Now the website has 65 or so different category pages, where it only had one CF script for displaying categories previously. It's #1 at MSN for almost any relevant search term you can think of.

So, I'm fairly convinced that the number of differently named files has an effect at MSN. And like I said, the relevancy of those pages probably matters--I doubt that you'd get a high ranking at MSN by making 100 pages about anything.

Gregg

[Raphael]

In my experience, OS Commerce is not the most SE-friendly suite out there. I'm presently halfway through writing a custom-built e-commerce solution for our company so we can dump OS Commerce.

[greggb]

In my experience, OS Commerce is not the most SE-friendly suite out there. I'm presently halfway through writing a custom-built e-commerce solution for our company so we can dump OS Commerce.

Maybe we can compare notes as to what you think needs to be done to make e-commerce software SE friendly. Here are a few of the things I've done:

1) Create a directory-like structure for product pages in SHTML. I could actually use plain HTML, but using SHTML allows me to display shopping cart content on all pages, and also incorporate an ad-rotating program into all pages.

2) Make titles, heading, and metadescriptions contain relevant information about the category/product pages. I've made the title of each product page "Product Name at Company Name". I've made the headings on each page the name of the product/category. And, I've made the metadescription contain relevant information about the category/product.

3) Make the product image "alt" tags contain the name of the product.

In addition to optimizing the general website template, those are the main things I've done with my e-commerce software, as far as making it SE friendly. I'm curious if you have any thoughts on other things that could be done.

Gregg