Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I just finished a store a few days ago, and the last step I did was creating a graphic skin for it, it is an Oscommerce based store heavily modified, which was when building it basically text/html/tables, and one of the last steps I took was to create a graphic look to it, by using graphical borders, what used to be just a table now has 8 extra cells around for a nice looking border/shadow and a background in the middle, etc.
My question is, does anyone actually think this might be seen as something bad by Google? Before even launching the store I was finding it on Google on asome given terms on the first pages, and now I do not even seem to find it on the first 100 search returns.
Since the template is one of the last things I changed, I thought that maybe Google doesn't like it as much now with so many graphics in there, so many graphics that do not even have an alt text on them, and which are so small most of them... Does anyone actually think that makes any sense, or I should be looking for a reason somewhere else?
I was even thinking on leaving the text template alone, or even have them both selectable by the user (the store has BTS, a template system) so they can choose the one they prefer, and force robots to use the basic/non graphics version of the template.
Any input will be welcome, thanks!
Aitor
It's particualrly common for a new site to show well in search results at first, only to vanish and then slowly build back. I call it the "honeymoon" period.
Many thanks on your answer, I surely do hope that is my problem there. It is quite strange, since I have to say that I do not actually remember for how long I had been in google already (it is a store that just went live, but it has been up for weeks/months so Google could go indexing it), but from what I see on Google Webmaster Tools Googlebot has been indexing the site for at least the last 90 days.
So I am not sure that "indexed, de-indexed, re-indexed" would apply to me, it is not like I put the page up two days ago.
I have another store runnig the same Oscommerce engine underneath (this one has been up for one year) and this one has not had any changes on the template, and it is still on first place/first page for some given search terms. That's why I found it odd that the other domain just vanished, and it was just when I switched to a more graphical template.
The engine underneath it as I say is the same, so I do not think it can have anything BAD to make Google hate one domain now, since he would then probably hate them both...
Some more info so hopefully someone can give me some more input.
I actually think right now that indeed, I messed up when switching the store "look" from HTML to graphics. Mainly because I converted each table to a 3x3 table where each cell had its background image, and the middle cell had the contents.
Now, after checking some graphical borders contributions for Oscommerce I think that the right way would probably have been using classes, so I can put the classes on a stylesheet and remove all those backgrounds from the tables.
I also had put several imgs on around which for the most part did not contain an alt tag. Google might also not like seeing so many images that do not have an alt tag...
I am in the process of cleaning up the code (mess) I did and hopefully it will have some effect.
