This is driving me CRAZY!!! My traffic is down and so are sales and every time I look at Google Webmaster Tools, I have more and more duplicate titles (294), duplicate meta tags (337), Not founds (341) Restricted by robots.txt (3,807) Soft 404s (1) Unreachable (7), etc...
I have almost 1000 products on my site. I have had a 3dcart store for maybe 4 years now. My traffic was always very low because I never did any marketing, SEO or link building until last year. My traffic and sales starting growing back in August 2011. My traffic started creeping up and up. Not much but for me, it was better. First I was averaging about 50-100 unique visitors a day for a few years, just probably from submitting my shopping feeds to Google, The Find and Bing. Then when I started actively working on the marketing of the site, I went up to 100, then 150, then 200, then 250, then 300... all in the matter of about 5 months. Christmas was amazing for me, I did more in sales in one month (Dec 2011) then I did in all of 2010. First two weeks of January, awesome!
Then, something happened. Two weeks into Jan someone had advised me to change my SSL certificate to a dedicated one and not the 3dcart store one. I listened and now I regret it. I have had nothing but issues ever since. First, I had tons of (and probably still have) a lot of hard coded images in my site and my blog within 3dcart that had the old secure address. When 3dcart sold me the new SSL, they didn't advise me that I needed to change all of this stuff. I started hearing of security issues. I changed as much as I could and I am still having a security issue. Google Webmaster Tools says that my SSL host name doesn't match my website name. Well, 3dcart checked and it does. I just found out that some old images with the 3dcartstore address are still hard coded deep in my blog so I am working on fixing those. Not sure if that is the security issue that is happening. Have had many, many tickets, and NO answers.
Then, a few days ago, someone at 3dcart discovered a sitemap issue in certain browsers that has now been escalated to a level 3, programmer I think. It's been a few days and they still don't know the issue or how to fix it. Could this could be causing my site traffic issue? My Google SSL issue? Who knows?
Here are my questions... looking at all the above Google Webmaster Tool stats, do you see an issue here and could those issues ultimately be causing my drop in traffic? Can the broken sitemap issue be causing the duplicate content issue or any other issues to cause a drop in traffic.
Please someone, anyone, any advice...critique....seo company...consultant...anything! I will take anything I can get at this point, all of this is making me want to reconsider my business and/or using 3dcart at this point. Oh, one more thing... Recently I was advised to get a Word Press blog as opposed to the one within 3dcart. I did just that and launched a few weeks ago. Have posted some blogs and already the Word Press blog is surpassing my 3dcart store, WHY would that happen? To me it would seem logical that there is an issue with my store if that is happening?
One last thing to add... due to all my researching of the duplicate content issues, I changed all my category pages and sub category landing pages to show all products on one page without the user having to click through a few pages of results. I did this thinking it would prevent those pages at least from being considered duplicate content but after I did that, my duplicate content numbers grew even [email protected]!
I have almost 1000 products on my site. I have had a 3dcart store for maybe 4 years now. My traffic was always very low because I never did any marketing, SEO or link building until last year. My traffic and sales starting growing back in August 2011. My traffic started creeping up and up. Not much but for me, it was better. First I was averaging about 50-100 unique visitors a day for a few years, just probably from submitting my shopping feeds to Google, The Find and Bing. Then when I started actively working on the marketing of the site, I went up to 100, then 150, then 200, then 250, then 300... all in the matter of about 5 months. Christmas was amazing for me, I did more in sales in one month (Dec 2011) then I did in all of 2010. First two weeks of January, awesome!
Then, something happened. Two weeks into Jan someone had advised me to change my SSL certificate to a dedicated one and not the 3dcart store one. I listened and now I regret it. I have had nothing but issues ever since. First, I had tons of (and probably still have) a lot of hard coded images in my site and my blog within 3dcart that had the old secure address. When 3dcart sold me the new SSL, they didn't advise me that I needed to change all of this stuff. I started hearing of security issues. I changed as much as I could and I am still having a security issue. Google Webmaster Tools says that my SSL host name doesn't match my website name. Well, 3dcart checked and it does. I just found out that some old images with the 3dcartstore address are still hard coded deep in my blog so I am working on fixing those. Not sure if that is the security issue that is happening. Have had many, many tickets, and NO answers.
Then, a few days ago, someone at 3dcart discovered a sitemap issue in certain browsers that has now been escalated to a level 3, programmer I think. It's been a few days and they still don't know the issue or how to fix it. Could this could be causing my site traffic issue? My Google SSL issue? Who knows?
Here are my questions... looking at all the above Google Webmaster Tool stats, do you see an issue here and could those issues ultimately be causing my drop in traffic? Can the broken sitemap issue be causing the duplicate content issue or any other issues to cause a drop in traffic.
Please someone, anyone, any advice...critique....seo company...consultant...anything! I will take anything I can get at this point, all of this is making me want to reconsider my business and/or using 3dcart at this point. Oh, one more thing... Recently I was advised to get a Word Press blog as opposed to the one within 3dcart. I did just that and launched a few weeks ago. Have posted some blogs and already the Word Press blog is surpassing my 3dcart store, WHY would that happen? To me it would seem logical that there is an issue with my store if that is happening?
One last thing to add... due to all my researching of the duplicate content issues, I changed all my category pages and sub category landing pages to show all products on one page without the user having to click through a few pages of results. I did this thinking it would prevent those pages at least from being considered duplicate content but after I did that, my duplicate content numbers grew even [email protected]!
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