SPH:
You've not only made a mistake to imply that my concern has anything to do with my site and rewritten urls but you are now politicing. As I've repeatedly stated, my concern was with your gibberish, spammy test description and if THAT could lead to a site penalty. That you're not concerned with the gibberish doesn't really concern me..
Whether I'm concerned with the gibberish or not is unimportant. What is important is What does Google and the other search engines think of it?
Your comment implies that I don't have any cares or concerns for my own store, which has the exact same 'gibberish' as all the other test stores. I'm sorry if I gave that impression, but I care for our store (and its rankings) tremendously. I'll not do anything to harm its current SE rankings. If I thought that was even a remote possibility I couldve/would've set up a 'disposable' store for these tests... I'd certainly not be risking the reputation of a store that has been 5+years in the making.
SPH:
My understanding is that Feznizzle's concern was similar to mine: some kind of abuse related to the gibberish spam.
I can understand your view, and I'm not sure how this is going to be taken, but you'll do yourself well to take anything Feznizzle says with a pinch of salt. This entire thread started from billshot that he wrote, and so far he hasn't really stopped.
SPH:
And yet with all of this exposure, your test product is not indexed as of this posting.
<Smiles> Don't worry, it'll show up in the next few days... that is simply how google works. It doesn't index 'products', in fact it doesn't even know what a 'product' is. It indexes 'words and phrases'. It doesn't need to know the meaning of them either... it finds them and indexes them.. that is its job.
The fact that it indexed the words on a page other than the product page itself is as much coincidence as anything else.. Again, that is simply the way the SE crawlers work.
Oh, and when it does get indexed, the store will then end up with at least 12 listings for the search query... possibly more... All good stuff, and what all store owners should be aiming for... :)
SPH:
Yet you do make a valid point re "garbage" links. I also thought of that: perhaps better to make any appearance at google than none at all.
Yes, Yes, Yes... This is the singlemost important thing for high rankings.. Links, links, and more links... These carry more weight than 'content'. (I'm surprised no one pointed this out before either... Too busy agreeing with my 'contect is king' I think.. <g>
SPH:
And you haven't yet proven that rewritting is ineffective.
I've never said it was... (please reread what I've actually been writing). I've been saying REDIRECTS are either INEFFECTIVE and possibly detrimental.
Redirects and Rewrites are NOT the same thing.. This was been established long ago in this thread.
I agree that I haven't been able to show that redirects are ineffective either, but that is simply because none of the stores in the current tests are using redirects, they are all using rewrites. Oh, unlike redirects which may be detrimental by there mere existence, the rewrites will never be detrimental (unless badly written).
SPH:
I already know that Ultimate SEO URL works...and at least as good as dynamic urls.
You know this, or are you assuming it because you've not managed any observable difference?
I knew ZenCart was exceptional Google friendly without additional enhancements, but until now, I don't think I appreciated how good.! :)
SPH:
Nobody denied that.
Not directly perhaps, but if it is acknowledged that Native ZenCart does such a good job, then why risk undoing this good job by replacing what it does natively' with something that still hasn't been shown to offer any positive benefits?
SPH:
In any event, there are other Native entries not yet there with you, one even with an updated xml sitemap.
Yes, just as there are other sites using SEO methods with xml sitemaps that are still also waiting.
This is showing without a doubt that when it comes to initial indexing there is no benefit to using SEO tools or xml sitemaps.
The latter surprises me. The former doesn't.
If it can't be proven to be beneficial it is snake oil. plain and simple. :)
Google doesn't know the meaning of 'gibberish'
It is just a computer. "walnuts" & "zxcvbhf" are nothing more than a collection 7 unrelated characters. One has no more meaning than the other.
SPH:
It will take me awhile to believe that.
I think this is one of those things that you'll just have to accept as fact (at least until you learn how to program). The thing is, what we see as 'words' the computer sees as just a collection of binary data... literally a series of '0's and '1's.
Using the same examples as above: What we see as 'walnut' the computer sees as
01110111 01100001 01101100 01101110 01110101 01110100
What we see as 'zxcvbh' the computer sees as
01111010 01111000 01100011 01110110 01100010 01101000
When we do a search, say for "walnut" google will convert "walnut' to it's binary equivalent, then do a compare of its database for the same binary string.
01110111 01100001 01101100 01101110 01110101 01110100 &
01111010 01111000 01100011 01110110 01100010 01101000 are clearly different, to us, they are now both 'gibberish', but to the computer they are both nothing more than a series of 0s and 1s that will either match, or won't match. Very accurate, very precise, but the computer doesn't know the 'meaning' of either.
SPH:
We can then wonder what, exactly, google means by "good content". Because the gibberish isn't it.
But if you are correct about the gibberish, it will then make writing descriptions for thousands of products much, much easier. :smile:
You've lost sight of the prize. "Good content" is whatever a merchant/site owner perceives is going to attract the most attention to the site/page/product in question. Google itself doesn't know 'good content' from a bar of soap.. This is a people thing, not a computer thing.
The 'gibberish' description of our test product is no more 'bad' than it is 'good'. Lets take a look at it...
Lets assume our test item has been well recieved and now appears in a 1000 different stores, all with the same 'gibberish' description.
A person does a search for "Wurldbitzer Debibulator" and is greeted with a 1000 sites and 10,000 links.. all esle being equal, there is nothing that would bring any one of the site or links to the top of the list. As stated, this is neither a good, or a bad description.
Now, what if ONE of these 1000 merchants add the phrase "cheapest price on town" to the 'gibberish' description.. It doesn't matter where in the description it is added...
Now, the same person doing the search has seen these 1000 sites with thier 10,000 links, and really can't decide which would be the best one to follow, so, they now narrow thier search by adding 'cheap' to their search query... IOW, they are now searching for "Cheap Wurldbitzer Debibulator".
Guess which site is most likely to show as the #1 result? It will be the site that has the added word "cheap" in the description, simply by virtue that the description has all three of the words being sought. The other 999 sites only having two words that match.
On this basis, the 'gibberish' with the added "cheapest price on town" is a good description in comparison to the other 999. Even though it is still 99.99% 'gibberish'.
This is why "it will then make writing descriptions for thousands of products much, much easier" simply won't work for real products. The description (aka content) needs to be meaningful for the page/product. Gibberish isn't likely to do that.
SPH:
As RodG pointed out, my first entry - promdressesforless.us - is now showing on google for the test product itself. Things to note:
- It has no xml sitemap whatsoever,
2, It is not in google webmasters,
3, It does not have google analytics.
So the theory (RodG?) that a rewritten site cannot perform without a xml sitemap is conclusively proven to be false.
It seems that way to me too. Interestingly this is one of those things that even fez' thought was true as well, so we've both been proven wrong. This is good. It is one thing that we no longer have to 'argue' about based on opinions and theorys, we now appear to have the facts/data, so we no longer have to stand by our opinions and theorys.
Don't you think it'd be great if we can use our test site data to prove/disprove our other theorys/opinions? This is what I'm trying to get out of this entire excersize... I'm really not interested in who is 'right' or 'wrong', I'm interested to see what the test data shows, especially after a 'reasonable' period of time (enough to allow Google to actually start to be able to 'rank' the sites)
The current observations were never a part of this experiment, it never really occured to me to even think about 'how long until a site gets something new into Google", one would assume that unless you were running a time critical site, this isn't going to be important to most people.
To say I'm a bit frustrated at the moment is an understatement, it appears the tests and trials are going to be cut short before the real tests have even started.
Sure, I haven't been able to demonstrate the redirect situation... I was never sure if I would be able to do this anyway (please re-read my posts), but surely the SEO supporters among you still have something that you'd like to prove, namely that SEO is ultimately going to have positive effects for the sites that uses them?
I still haven't seen a shred of evidence to support these claims, but I have managed to manipulate things so that we now have several sites set up with that can be used to show if "Freindly URL's" will perform better than the others, but only time will tell, and even then it may not provide anything conclusive, but on the other hand, it also just might...... we won't know until/unless we simply sit back and wait and watch.
Cheers
Rod
