40 replies to this topic

[linux_lover]

I do see what John means about your design, Rolf. The logo and yellow with the cats around are great, but the other elements are a little boring.

What I would do is dress up your menu and the newsletter boxes with more fancy borders in line with the style of your logos.

Watch the while space around your elements as some of the boxes are almost touching like 'see also' and 'cat stories'.

[Ignoramus]

I liked it but then I'm biased, being the (joint) owner of 3 moggies.

Good clear product descriptions and buckets of stories/humour/information for the serious cat lover.

If I may venture two comments..

1. I tend to agree with Scottie that anyone glancing at the home page might think that Purr is your only product.

2. When I tried the links (bottom of the home page) to 'Cat Stories and Articles' and 'Cat Picture Gallery' they didn't work. All I got was a blank screen. Hitting the back button in IE had me thrown off the site and in Firefox I got returned to the home page.

I'm not going to show my wife your site or you'll probably be able to retire young.

[Abhay]

i like d site bt the menu did nt impressed me..
the site cud b better thn this..

[rolf]

Thanks for your comments Abhav - could you expand on them? What didn't you like and what could I do to improve things for you?

[rolf]

I posted about some problems we're having with getting traffic from Google and on Jill's suggestion I am copying the post here (below) to see if anyone can add to the discussion on this front.

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Some of you will already know some of the history as I've been hanging around here for a while, but I'll give a brief synopsis for clarity.

In 2005 we set up a website to support our eBay activites, and a very fine job the site did too. We made the site SE friendly, researched keywords and based new content around the most relevant/least competetive and all was going well, picking up new links and more traffic all the time.

Leading up to in March 06 we were ranking pretty well for a good number of phrases, which were bringing in respectable numbers of visitors and generating respectable numbers of conversions. Month on month our SE traffic was growing by about 8-10% and we decided the website had outgrown it's original purpose of supporting our eBay activities and needed to become an entity in it's own right. This is where the problems started!

We bought a new domain (to reflect our business name rather than our eBay user ID) and built some new parts to the site to give the visitors more to see. We added shopping facilities and expanded our range of products. We did a complete overhaul of the design, retaining pretty much all of the original content but incorporating all the new stuff too. I set up 301's on all of the old pages on the old domain, arguably a mistake considering aging delay issues, but this was 15 months ago now so all of that should have passed.

Within a few weeks traffic nosedived. After a couple of months, things with Yahoo and MSN returned as they were before - i.e. a meager but steady stream of traffic, but google sent us virtually nothing.

Things improved over the following months with Yahoo, and marginally with Goolge and MSN but nothing major happened.

We waited patiently for the aging delay to end, expecting significant improvements as none of the original content had changed and (we felt) other factors should only have been beneficial in the long term, but nothing happened, and it still hasn't. We're lucky if Google approaches 200 visitors a month right now and if we were one of those companies that relies on its search engine traffic we'd have gone out of business by now.

We've continued to promote the site, adding good content, garnering for links (albeit with some limited success), [url=http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showforum=21]Submitting to Directories[/url], looking for potential blockages and removing them where possible, but other than neglegable fluctuations our SE traffic/rankings haven't improved for months.

I'm coming to the conclusion that Google just hates us, but I the only evidence I can find for that is the complete lack of reaction to everything and anything we do to try and improve things.

Can anyone make any suggestions about why this may or may not be the case and what we can do about it? I always avoid the black hat stuff and put a lot of effort into making a site worthy of our visitors attention, but as it stands the last 15 months of work on the site has been a total waste of my time. I'm seriously considering moving the site back to it's supportive role and concentrating on things that actually have some kind of result.

Oh yeah, forgot to say, virtually every page of the site is indexed, but all bar a handful of pages are in the supplementals

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Thanks for the input

[Ignoramus]

This may be just a temporary thing but both the .com site and the .co.uk site came back as 'site not found'.

tracert on both sites couldn't resolve the domain names.

[rolf]

Interesting - I know our host is having some DNS issues today, I didn't realize we were affected (we weren't this morning) :-(

[rolf]

OK, the DNS issues seems to be sorted now and it seems to all be working again

[Ignoramus]

Quick observation....

The title on your home page (which might be your only page with external links) is simply 'The Purr Company'.

Presumably, this tells the SEs nothing about your site.

Shouldn't you be including a few keywords like 'cat toys' in the title related to your home page content ?

[rolf]

D'oh! Well spotted, I'm not sure how I missed that :-s

[W3Daryl]

I was just looking over your site and there seems to be a lot that could be done with it. Firstly when you did your 301 did you just 301 the pages, or the entire old domain? Keep in mind 301ing the internal pages really doesn't do much other then letting your users who have had the page cached be redirected to the new page. Where as the actual site, or at least the root of the site ( http://site/ ) has all the strength of the external links. Secondly I would ditch the old non CSS layout as there is a lot of unnecessary code being utilized within your website which lowers the content to markup ratio. And thirdly I'd mod rewrite your entire catalog, as soon as a url has a ?variable=value you've basically shot yourself in the foot for the search engines. And fourthly be committed to link building and set weekly/monthly link goals. Cheers.

[torka]

Secondly I would ditch the old non CSS layout as there is a lot of unnecessary code being utilized within your website which lowers the content to markup ratio.

No such thing, at least as far as Google is concerned. A few minutes into this video interview with Vanessa Fox, she explains how code-to-text-ratio is basically a non-starter (about 12:50 on the counter).

Google just doesn't really care all that much about the code to text ratio. We're going to pick up the text — extract it from the page — and we're really going to ignore the code.

There are many good reasons for cleaning up code, but concerns about code-to-text ratio for the SEs is not one of them.

HTH!

--Torka

Edited by torka, 20 June 2007 - 09:39 AM.
edit to clarify source of second quote

[Jill]

And thirdly I'd mod rewrite your entire catalog, as soon as a url has a ?variable=value you've basically shot yourself in the foot for the search engines.

Huh? That's simply untrue.

[rolf]

Thanks to all for the feedback.

Re: 301s - I'm not totally clear on the differentiation you're making there, but I 301-ed each individual page including the index, and 404-ed any nonexistent pages to the new domain.

Keep in mind 301ing the internal pages really doesn't do much other then letting your users who have had the page cached be redirected to the new page

I was under the impression that 301s work for users, bookmarks, google, whatever - not sure I've heard about internal pages (I'm assuming you mean pages other than the index) being treated differently than any other. I did get a little confused by the whole 301/302 issue at the time and I now know I could have handled it better, but either way I think that ship has sailed, for good or bad.

Anyway, I'm always interested to know as much as possible about these rules and their quirks, can you clarify or point me to some more info about this?

Re: link building, I agree totally. I've had a few lateral ideas and have started to put them in place, already got a couple of links out of it too so fingers crossed it will continue to work and will be a good way forward.

[torka]

I was under the impression that 301s work for users, bookmarks, google, whatever - not sure I've heard about internal pages (I'm assuming you mean pages other than the index) being treated differently than any other.

You're not the one who is confused. There is no difference in the treatment of 301s from the home/default page and any other page of the domain. A redirect will make sure that visitors — which would include the SE spiders — land on the new page instead of the old, no matter whether they came there through a link, a bookmark or typing in the old page URL directly. A 301 should also pass link popularity to the new page as well (although it may take some time for the SEs to catch up, they eventually should).

Of course, you do want to try to get any links that point to old nonexistent URLs changed to point to the appropriate new page if possible, but as long as you have a 301 in place, you don't need to sweat those that you can't get changed for whatever reason.

My

--Torka