Google effect in action

I've been running a web site that acts as a wrapper for Amazon's aStore. This was started as an experiment a few years ago, yet it didn't accomplish much, beyond a learning experience in how to use PHP to perform some on-the-fly screen scrapping and content embellishing. It was also something I could use when experimenting with PPC advertising. Having been pulled in some lucrative projects I didn't pay any more attention to this. In fact functionality that used to work, like search engine friendly URLs (SEFU), is now broken...

Anyway, glancing over my analytics account today I see a smashing 338% traffic increase during the last month:

Wow ! All this traffic coming from Google. To what do I owe the honour ? No inbound links, none of the usual favourable auspices. The only logical explanation is Amazon dropping their affiliates form California, about at the same time as my jump in traffic, which likely caused the poor folks to pull the plug on their sites. Or perhaps a glitch in Google's secret sauce for bestowing wealth in cyberspace ? Anyway, the people are coming in, goals as measured by analytics are fulfilled, meaning people are adding stuff to their carts, good times rolling.

Of course the earnings exploded :)

One thing that strikes me is the conversion rate, which at 7.69% stands much higher than industry average (which I believe stands at less than 2%). So yeah, this passive income thingy is not entirely hype. If you can bring people over, the money will follow.

be careful when deleting web content

Until recently, when I was updating the inventory for www.negustore.com I used to delete old product pages, that I wasn't carrying any longer. To be honest, I didn't realize I was doing that, instead I discovered it through analytics.

So here I was, yanking out pages that were already indexed by Google, and sending incoming traffic to my custom 404 handler. After the required head-smack I changed my code to keep the product pages and change the availability to "not available" and remove the add to cart button. That's the sensible thing to do. Lots of people may still be interested in the product specs, even if they are not on sales anymore. Better yet I could add some adsense pointing to places that sells them.

Interesting thought, it'd be nice if adsense would give us more control to what's included in each ad block, e.g. product for sale, instead of redundant product info, in my case.

I'm still wondering, how does removing of pages that were previously indexed affect the overall page rank of the site. Common sense it tells it can't be good. The last thing a search engine wants is to send people over to broken links.

Same thing goes for moving things around, if possible don't do it, if there's no choice, use 302 permanent redirects handlers that still listen to the old URLs until they are removed from the indexes.

is it worth pursuing search engine friendly URLs ?

As someone who's running a few e-commerce sites, I'm always on the look for ways to attract traffic to my sites. One of the best sources of traffic are search engines, and the key to attract traffic from them is to observe the best SEO, or search engine optimization, practices.

One of those practices widely touted was to use SEFU, or search engine friendly URLs. That means avoiding dynamic URLs, that contain a query segment with parameters (anything following the '?' sign, in the form 'name=value', maybe separated by '&') and instead use static URLs that contain targeted keywords, separated by '-'. There are many ways to translate a dynamic URL into a static one. I used url rewriting capabilities provides by the mod_rewrite module of Apache web server. Yet I'd been thinking, if it's so easy to make this translation, why would the search engines make such a big fuss about. After all, the content they get is the same, so it shouldn't make any difference.

Yet it makes all the difference in the world. You see, when you use a dynamic URL, usually with cryptic values as parameters, like product numbers, or session id, or whatever, you make no clear assertion about the content the URL is pointing too. That is, a subsequent fetching of the same URL may produce an entirely different content, since after all it's the result of a dynamic script, right ? The content may change based on internal state like the date or time, or based on the parameters passed. So understandably the search engines are reluctant to place too much weight on the content. Yes, you could use the title tag, or metadata to describe the content, but still, nothing guarantees that the mapping between the URL and the content will stay the same.

On the other hand, when you use a static URL, with embedded keywords, you add semantics to the URL, making its destination clear, giving it a sense of permanence. Now that's something that the search engines can bank on.

So I changed the product URLs on my www.greencirclestore.com site to be SEFU and the results were excellent. The amount of traffic from search engines doubled and the crawling activity kicked into high gear. All in all I'm pretty pleased with the results.