Online store and search engines

Free Merchant webstore

[Bidaci]

I am a novice at search engines and webstores and need some guidance. When I first started my store years ago it showed up in all the search engines with very good page rankings. Now my store has dropped out of site. With all the changes happening with search engines I am wondering if it is because it is hosted by Free Merchant and is a subdomain @ safeshopper.com or is it more likely that I need to optimize my pages better. I am leaning to the subdomain reason because if I do a Google search on an obscure part number and description it is not found even though the site is listed with a domain search.
Do I try optimizing my pages or abandon freemerchant and try something like osCommerce?

[derekwong28]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld! If you are serious about your webbusiness, you must get your own domain name and use a paid hosting account. For a start, free hosted accounts are unreliable because of limited bandwidth, so that they are often down. Besides they can close your account suddenly for whatever reason they choose.

As for search engine rankings, this is a very difficult question to answer. It is possible that search engines may purposefully downgrade websites hosted on some free accounts because these are commonly by to spam search engines e.g. link farms, doorway pages etc.

[Bidaci]

Thanks for your quick reply. Just to clarify things a bit. This is not a free hosting service. I am concerned about the way the domain name is handled myname.safeshopper.com and that this may be some of the problem. I just don't want to spin my wheels trying to optimize pages if it is not the best way to go.

[derekwong28]

What I suspect is that your shopping site ~safeshopper.com has got quite a high search engine ranking, and that filtered down to your subdomain right at the beginning. Therefore your site got a higher than usual ranking.

As time goes on, the search engines, in particularly Google will adjust the ranking based on the links to your actual subdomain rather than the main site i.e. ~safeshopper.com. That is probably why you saw a drop in traffic.

Whatever the reason, I would still strongly that you get a domain of your own as you do not want to be held hostage to that shopping site.

Derek