Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Has anyone experienced problems with getting OS Commerce sites indexed in google? I'm only really assuming it's an OS commerce issue as there is no other logical explanation.
We have;
> rewritten the URL's to html format (3 months ago)
> Implemented dynamic meta tags (3 months ago)
> implemented an XML Google sitemap (2 weeks ago)
However, Google is still only indexing the old dynamic URL's and old generic meta (title & descrip).
I don't think it's a time issue as other google sitemaps that we submitted at the same time have had the desired effect.
Can this be an OS Commerce issue or had google crossed the site off their chistmas card list? (the google PR hasn't changed and no unethical linking strategies are being used)
Thanks in advance!
Lee
The seo mods, from what I've gathered, are especially poorly executed, which is no surprise, after all, why would any good programmer create a mod for osc?
And of course, with the developers with enough skills to have gotten disgusted at the project's condition all having now left to work on things like zencart and other offshoots mentioned on this page, it's basically a lost cause, the people who would and could have fixed it are long gone now, leaving behind what you see.
But still oscommerce has that darned name, inertia is the only thing keeping it alive now, if I can do my small part to finally kill it off it will have been a good day for me.
Last I checked, which I'm happy to say was a year or so ago, oscommerce had not released any update at all for almost 2 YEARS. no security patches, nothing. See above for reasons, no developers are touching it, at least none with skills. I haven't checked to see if they finally released an update, but don't be fooled, all the updates that have been released are being released by the real live projects, like zencart.
quick check of the sites:
zencart latest release: Zen Cart v1.3.0.1 Patch Release [Notes] (2006-04-22 14:43), a few weeks ago.
osc latest release: osCommerce 2.2 Milestone 2 Update 051113 [nov, 2005 that is]. And that was the first update in I think 2 years].
Not that any osc update matters, I know in the case of the site I got running again, I can never patch anything on it because the code is so profoundly messed up that it was a miracle to even get it running at all, I'm never touching it again unless it's to export the databases and import them into a zencart or some other decently done shopping cart. The good side of working with an osc install is that all the abstractions of what makes code and programming good or bad suddenly become utterly real, since it's all bad, you suddenly realize that bad programming really is bad, and will never become good as long as the people who wrote it continue to run the project. Obviously, since if they were good, or even decent, the programming would be at least decent.
Other stuff I've looked at is quite different, phpbb, while not seo friendly out of the box, has very nice coding standards, it's easy to read, pretty easy to hack from what I've seen, good templating, easy to tweak, all in all, definitely something you can work with over time. Same for wordpress, despite their addiction to using globals, which will have to be fixed once php 5 becomes standardized.
I was brushed off with "that can't be the problem".
Year in and year out I have seen the same exact attitude, both here and on other seo forums, and while I haven't gone back to verify that the posters complaining the most loudly today were the same that would not fix their broken/cheating/dupe content etc sites yesterday, I will bet you they are one and the same. That's the ones who think google should make up for all their mistakes, tricks, seo hacks etc, and complain the most violently when one day they wake up to realize that it's not working anymore.
I used to make the same mistake, but once I started spending the time I'd been spending complaining fixing the errors, magically my sites started ranking fine for their stuff, even on some very difficult to rank for terms.
All I can do is commend google each time one of their updates starts slicing these sites out of the serps, or out of the index itself, which I guess has been happening lately, although I think that the symptoms are being severely misunderstand and misinterpreted by those who think they have been affected. In other words, if you try to extract any meaning at all from any of the google commands, like link:, site: etc, you are just wasting your time. Study the serps, study traffic, study reality, not what google is deciding to show you, they have no motivation to help seos, and every motivation to confuse them, and since basically only seos use those tools, figure it out yourselves.
What shopping cart do you all recommend over oscommerce?
zencart (was originally an oscommerce fork).
I don't buy that the reason oscommerce stores are losing indexed pages since the big daddy update is because of a poor design.
No need to. The issue goes back way before Big Daddy. The osCommerce indexing issues have been ongoing for quite some time.
I don't buy that the reason oscommerce stores are losing indexed pages since the big daddy update is because of a poor design.
LOL
I'll quote g1smd again since you appear to have missed it [g1smd, wipe that laugh away this instant, but can't blame you for it...]:
I was brushed off with "that can't be the problem".
Always this comes from people who are either not willing or not able to do the fixes, or who are, usually I'd suspect, unwilling to pay someone to do the fixes. And who will then go to great lengths posting about why their great site doesn't rank.
Or who are stuck in osc, and can't figure out a way to escape.
I've stopped doing site reviews completely because of this, it's just too predictable, and as g1smd noted, it's not something that looks like it's about to change anytime soon. And in the case of oscommerce, when you start with a bad platform, you may have success, but you may also fail, and when you fail, it will be very hard to fix the underlying issues since they are built in.
each to his own, my only purpose posting this is in the hope that some people who might be on the edge about deciding which package to use avoid osc. Anyone stuck with it, my condolences, I know the feeling. If you haven't done too many hacks on it, the export into zencart is fairly easy I believe, cut your losses and move on, it's an infrastructure decision you'll never regret making.
I don't care if you buy my 'argument', whatever one you're refering to, it makes no difference at all to me, why should it?
These aren't issues I have any particular doubt about any longer, if you followed the development of the new google stuff from bourbon to jagger to big daddy pretty much nothing that has happened would be any real surprise, hasn't surprised me at least.
Why should I care if someone who is not a client pays attention to me or not, doesn't make any difference in any greater scheme of things. I will admit I get annoyed when clients don't, but since they tend to come around a few months later, then their sites also tend to come back, even that really doesn't matter much. Psychology is psychology, most of this has zero to do with analysis or logic, and everything to do with stubborness and trying to take shortcuts.
If you're having issues, good luck getting them resolved.
Then you jump from that to saying you don't believe the intrinsic errors of osc could possibly have anything do with the changes? Have you been reading the relevant google algo code or something? My hats off to you.
Google began making sites that sucked suffer many months ago, almost a year ago. People who fixed their sucking sites recovered, people, like you, who refused to fix them, and refused to even believe that their sites sucking could possibly have anything to do with indexing or ranking problems, probably are still not ranking.
The threads were the same then, some people pointed out possible problem areas, fixing those solved our sites issues within a few weeks. Meanwhile, the posters in those threads, like you, kept on posting that their sites issues could not possibly the problem.
We moved on, new google algos, new realities, we adjusted, and keep adjusting. Since you have no apparent grounds for your beliefs, they aren't very convincing. If you do have solid empirical grounds for them, it would be interesting to hear what they are. Hopefully they include having read all the relevant documentation, whitepapers, google patent apps, etc.
Anyway, again, I really don't care about osc stuff anymore, I'm not speaking metaphorically here, I am fully satisfied that osc has the worst programming I've ever seen in my life. I will admit that worse programming could and does exist, but I don't want to see it. So defending something like that, whatever, each to his own, makes no difference to me. People like marlboro cigarettes too, even though they are just about the worst possible tobacco product in the world.
Can you give me a specific example of what is wrong with the code?
Yikes! Hold on, let me go get something to eat real quick so I can relax and enjoy the show. Be back shortly. Please do be nice to one another from this point forward (if you can). We do have a TOS here and I just want to make sure that we remain within those guidelines.
Yahoo & MSN are indexing my OS Commerce pages with no problems whatsoever, and alot faster. All rewritten URLs are in the index and rank well and all old dynamic URL's are no longer exist in the their indexes. Google on the other hand is causing headaches, maybe this is one area where Google, for once, does not excel!
I must be honest, when the client first approached me to optimise their OS Commerce sites I was a little dubious and as a matter of precaution I ran some 'Google simulator' tests and the results showed that Google had no problem in crawling the site.. in practice things are obviously different.
I can only assume that there is a problem with duplicate content, but how do you determine this? I can't see more than one page with the same content. Does anyone know how to run a test to see if there is any duplicate content on a site?
Cheers!
However, you can't make a blanket statment that osc stores are not getting indexed/ranked because they are poorly designed.
Why can't you say this? Because some stores are fully indexed and ranking very well. The big question is why do some rank so well and some can't even get indexed.
Answer this and you will be a rich man.
Because some stores are fully indexed and ranking very well. The big question is why do some rank so well and some can't even get indexed.
My question would be "who's next"? While some are still doing fine, is this a prelude to what is in store for most osCommerce sites? Is it a "shot over the bow"?
Good question
I could be wrong but I don't see a cross-sell contribtion or master products contribution. These are just two that we must have.
Cross selling is a part of the cart. You just have to flip it on.
When you talk about master products, do you mean a base product where you can have ad on and customized?
Example would be Polo Shirt
Sub product would be
Polo Shirt Red, Small
Polo Shirt Red, Medium
Polo Shirt Red, Large
Polo Shirt Blue, small
etc.
Why don't we just use attribute options? Because you cannot put model numbers on options or track quantities on options.
When a customer orders a product or sub product, our picking list prints the correct model number so you know you are pulling the right product instead of going by description.
This also has a benefit of producing the correct sales reports at the end of the year.
Oh man. You don't want me to list all the problems with osCommerce do you?
Most of the stuff is to do with non-unique titles per page, non unique meta descriptions per page, same site at www and non-www (though any site can be hit by that), unfriendly dynamic URL format, too many parameters in URLs, same parameters but in a different order in some URLs (duplicate content), same content appearing at multiple URLs (depending on how you got to the page), low amount of unique on-page content compared to all the category and product links that surround the small bit of content, session IDs (duplicate content), indexing of pages that should not be indexed (admin log-in stuff etc), non-valid HTML, code bloat stuffed full of font tags (why, when some bits already have stylesheets defined are they not used?), poor use of heading tags, poor semantic structure, code bloat, poor use of alt attributes, and on and on and on....
The beast can be tamed, but that is a lot of work.
All of those fixes should be in the core product, not published as dozens of add-on butchery for use after the event. Adding the "SEO friendly URLs" after a site has already been indexed is the kiss of death because the "SEO friendly URLs" only makes the site work with new URLs. The contribution provides no way to de-index all the existing URLs from the search engine. You have to get in there and set up some URL-detection that feeds a 404 or 301 response then wait 2 to 6 months for Google to figure out what the heck it is that you are trying to do.
All these things should be designed in, not left to be added as an afterthought by those who realise that the core product sucks.
I can't see more than one page with the same content. Does anyone know how to run a test to see if there is any duplicate content on a site?
The key concept here is that only one indexed url should resolve to any given bit of content. Think "url" and not "page", because page is a vague concept, not a technically defined one. g1smd just described several ways that "duplicate content" issues get generated by having the same content available for different urls. Just flipping the order of parameters in a query string creates a new url, even though what appears on screen may not be a different "page".
why do some rank so well and some can't even get indexed.
That is an important question. Some may be customized to get around problems. Some may not be exposing certain variations of urls to googlebot. And maybe, Google just hasn't picked up on the issues for these sites...yet.
The laundry list that g1smd made is important -- not just for oscommerce sites but for any site. You may not see a problem right now from any one of those items, but they sure can pop up. And recently they've been popping up more and more. Especially since Google started spidering any urls it could find, anywhere it could find them
It didn't used to be this way, and webmasters could afford to be naive about such things. Not any more.
[edited by: tedster at 11:30 pm (utc) on May 24, 2006]
I think that the idea behind a package like osCommerce is absolutely fantastic. Install a chunk of scripts and have a live inventory, catalogue site, and shopping cart, all up and running in just a few hours (plus many more hours actually adding products to it).
It is just that the implementation, or more specifically how those packages interface to search engines that is just so badly thought out.
But for solutions to some of the problems, lets address them here for others....
Here are just a few things you can do to fix OScommerce....
Some solutions to the problems are as follows:
#1 : WWW vs. Non-WWW
Solution:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [domain.com...] [R=permanent,L]
# Eliminates www vs. non-www
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ [domain.com...] [R=301,L]
# Eliminates duplicate home page i.e.: www.domain.com/index.php and www.domain.com appear as duplicate home page
------------------------------------------------------------
#2 Duplicate Titles, Descriptions, Keywords, Etc...Meta's
Solution: Linda McGrath's Header Tags Controller
Allows you to customize on a per-page basis
------------------------------------------------------------
#3 Unfriendly dynamic URL format, too many parameters in URL's
Solution: Ultimate SEO URL's by Chemo or BlueYon's SEO URL's contribution
(Though these still can produce duplicate URL's as I am experiencing)
------------------------------------------------------------
#4 OSCommerce Product Reviews
Solution: Write a custom review for every product or your going to get duplicate content in Google's eyes
------------------------------------------------------------
#5 Session ID's
Solution: Either turn on cookies or use the following in your .htaccess
# Skip the next two rewriterules if NOT a spider
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT}!(msnbot¦slurp¦googlebot) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [S=2]
#
# case: leading and trailing parameters
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.+)&osCsid=[0-9a-z]+&(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) $1?%1&%2 [R=301,L]
#
# case: leading-only, trailing-only or no additional parameters
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.+)&osCsid=[0-9a-z]+$¦^osCsid=[0-9a-z]+&?(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) $1?%1 [R=301,L]
(Other contributions will kill the session id's though as well...search OSCommerce contrib area)
--------------------------------------------------------------
#6 Poor Semantic Structure
Solution: Turn your results up to 1000 if need be so you don't have URL's like the following
?page=blahblah parameters
index.php?manufacturers_id=10&page=7
---------------------------------------------------------------
#7 non-valid HTML
Solution: Fix the code of course to your best and run it through W3C.
---------------------------------------------------------------
#8 indexing of pages that should not be indexed (admin log-in stuff etc)
Solution: .htaccess and robots.txt deny rules will fix this
---------------------------------------------------------------
#9 poor use of heading tags
Solution: Adjust your stylesheet and modify some of the code to get rid of class="Heading" and replace it with H1's
---------------------------------------------------------------
I'm not sure what g1smd is referring to poor use of alt attributes but that is some of the solutions to OSCommerce issues. Maybe others can contribute to this list with proper fixes/implementations.
[edited by: MLHmptn at 11:04 pm (utc) on May 24, 2006]
You are right about the attributes. I do know that the zen cart plans to release a fix for this soon. The nice thing about zen is that you can actually suggest fixes and the designers listen. You can also pay some one to write a bit of php for you to tie part numbers in.
Most of the zen designers will write fixes and mods if you ask for them and pay for it. They are very reasonable and they do it quickly.
With this I mean writing your HTML as headings, paragraphs, lists, tables and forms: semantic markup.
>> Poor use of alt attribute.
With this I mean having an alt attribute product description that shows if the image does not.
You are correct that some of those contributions go some way to fixing the listed problems. However, my beef is that they should not be "contributions", which are basically "after thought fixes for poor design". Those coding standards and methodologies should be designed in to the core product from the get go.
People just want to install the thing and start adding products. They don't want to have to go fix broken stuff that came with the product first - and most store owners wouldn't know what was broken or how, and much less have the technical wherewithal to do something about it.
Look. If you bought a television from a shop, you wouldn't ever expect that as delivered you had to solder in the last 10 components, and rewire the channel change and volume controls to make them work as advertised... so why do people put up with the same sort of thing in software (don't pull the "oh but the software is free" stunt on me either - it isn't free when you paid someone for several days of work to fix stuff like this).
And yes, OSCommerce out of the box is an utter mess for people that know little about php, mysql, etc. People shouldn't have to modify the core product out of the box. Hopefully this will be addressed in the next release of OSCommerce. But afterall OSCommerce is open source... We are free to do with it the way we want unlike 90% of the shopping carts available to the masses.
Look. If you bought a television from a shop, you wouldn't ever expect that as delivered you had to solder in the last 10 components, and rewire the channel change and volume controls to make them work as advertised... so why do people put up with the same sort of thing in software (don't pull the "oh but the software is free" stunt on me either - it isn't free when you paid someone for several days of work to fix stuff like this).
Whoops, I already mentioned the "Open Source" thing. :>~ And yes, very valid points G1! Very valid.
One another note, if your apt to install OScommerce, try some of the variants out there....CRELoaded, ZenCart, OSCMAX, etc. as some of them come preinstalled with the needed contributions.
[edited by: MLHmptn at 11:26 pm (utc) on May 24, 2006]
On another note as I stated above, why does Google and only Google have the OSCommerce indexing issue? Yahoo and MSN don't seem to have a problem with it.
Thanks for the tips on how to fix the existing problems. I have already implemented most of the fixes you posted. I noticed a couple that I should also add.
I have also started working on the internal links to try to get rid of some of the urls with parameters that change location.
Changed from links to <form>. Not sure if this will keep G from following but I think it may help.
