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osCommerce

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Google Supplemental Index on your store?


cgchris99

Google Supplemental Index on your store?  

73 members have voted

  1. 1. Is your store experiencing google supplemental results?

    • My site on google is all or mostly supplemental
      31
    • My site is partially listed as supplemental
      10
    • My site is listed perfectly in google
      14


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kymation,

 

any tips on how you did the 404 error on pages that no longer exist?

 

Thanks

Sure. Find this code in product_info.php:

  $product_check = tep_db_fetch_array($product_check_query);

and add this just after it:

// Return 404 Not Found for non-existing products
 if ($product_check['total'] < 1) header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");

The page will still look the same to visitors. Only the header code is changed.

 

Regards

Jim

See my profile for a list of my addons and ways to get support.

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550 views and only 18 responses. arrggghhh.

Please answer the poll. It was interesting enough to read but not interesting enough to answer?

 

Over 66% of the respondents say their experiencing supplemental results on their oscommerce store. Any comments from the developers?

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i didn't vote because my suppliments are only old pages :)

 

i'm not a pro at programming so i'm only making an assumption that this is not oscommerce's developers fault.

 

it takes a lot of work to make osc 100% seo friendly (which i think is a good thing, because it weeds out the lazy shop owners that want to put up a shop and make a quick buck, whereas the rest of us spend days and weeks configuring our stores to perfection.. also makes it harder on our competition that use osc :) )

 

when i first set my oscommerce shop live, most of my results were supplimental. each supplimental page had problems i hadn't noticed (each different, individual problems) until i did the search for the suppliments.. took quite a while to figure and fix each problem too. each was caused by my hand and had nothing to do with the out-of-the-box oscommerce.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Here is my situation for www.noahsanimalfigurines.com:

 

-I only have one page (home page) in the regular results.

-The rest of the indexed pages are Supplemental Results, and they are all html pages

-The cache dates for the Supplemental Results pages are August/September 2005

-I actually don't know if these pages were in the Supplemental Results before the Big Daddy update, or if they just got changed to Supplemental.

-None of my php pages are listed in Google at all

-My site was launched in August 2005

-I have more than 7,000 products, but none of them are indexed in Google

-I have a Google SiteMaps account that shows Google has crawled the php pages and the only time that errors are reported is when my host is having problems or if the page no longer exists.

 

I voted in the poll. Does anyone have any idea why my pages aren't indexed? Is it because the links are dynamic?

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550 views and only 18 responses. arrggghhh.

Please answer the poll. It was interesting enough to read but not interesting enough to answer?

 

Over 66% of the respondents say their experiencing supplemental results on their oscommerce store. Any comments from the developers?

 

no, it wasn't interesting to read but you only know that after your read it.

Treasurer MFC

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<snip>Does anyone have any idea why my pages aren't indexed? Is it because the links are dynamic?

No, it's because Google has major problems with the Big Daddy update. Many sites were lost from the index or reverted to an old index. Some people claim they were reincluded after complaining to Google. Some deep links to your product pages would probably help. Google will get their act together eventually and fix the problem, so you could just wait.

 

Regards

Jim

See my profile for a list of my addons and ways to get support.

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I have been reading about the BD update on a lot of other websites/forums and kymation seems to be correct. Everyone is complaining, screaming, and ready to jump from the top floor.

 

I understand that google is trying to rid the index of spam but when you knock out 50% of the good sites then your fix is no longer a fix.

 

If I worked for the MSN marketing team, I would be all over this in their advertising.

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Many sites were lost from the index or reverted to an old index.

Thank you for your replies. I am not sure whether it is the Big Daddy update

or not. The reason I say this is I have always been tracking the number of

pages that Google has indexed and it is always around 2,300 to 2,500. I

really have no idea if they were regular or supplemental pages.

 

The problem, though, is that I launched my site in August 2005 and the number

of pages indexed has not changed. If all of the current pages indexed are html

and the number of pages indexed has not changed in the past 9 months, then

it seems that Google has never indexed my PHP pages, doesn't it?

 

If they had indexed my PHP files, then they would have shown up as indexed when

I checked the index by doing site:www.noahsanimalfigurines at some point during

the past 9 months.

 

Does that make sense?

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Thank you for your replies. I am not sure whether it is the Big Daddy update

or not. The reason I say this is I have always been tracking the number of

pages that Google has indexed and it is always around 2,300 to 2,500. I

really have no idea if they were regular or supplemental pages.

 

The problem, though, is that I launched my site in August 2005 and the number

of pages indexed has not changed. If all of the current pages indexed are html

and the number of pages indexed has not changed in the past 9 months, then

it seems that Google has never indexed my PHP pages, doesn't it?

 

If they had indexed my PHP files, then they would have shown up as indexed when

I checked the index by doing site:www.noahsanimalfigurines at some point during

the past 9 months.

 

Does that make sense?

The PHP pages may not show when you do a site: request from Google. Google limits the number of pages that it returns for any search to about 1000. If you have 2500 pages in the index, the new pages may be so far down in the list that you never see them.

 

Google also does not necessarily index all of the pages on a site, especially if you have a big site. The exact thresholds are unknown, but Google seems to judge the quality (via Page Rank) of the pages that it has retrieved and sets its spidering depth based on those results. Unless all of your indexed pages are fairly highly ranked, Google may decide to not spider more pages. You could have hit a limit at 2500.

 

Regards

Jim

See my profile for a list of my addons and ways to get support.

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I don't get crap from Google...........well hardly.

Only a few pages show. I have never been very successful with google but MSN and Yahoo show up a whole lot more.

I'm a victim of circumstance

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  • 6 months later...

Just to bring this topic back up as theres been no updates since May.

 

Most of my pages are still in the supplemental. When I look at the cached versions they are all old pages from May 2006 which is not good news as we have updated our site since then (e.g product_info.php and the categories pages)

 

Are there any people out there who still have a problem with their pages all being in supplemtal or are there any people who have hints to get out of it?

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My original site went live about 3-4 years ago and I upgraded to a bells and whistles store with loads of major contributions added early this year. Contribs. include mod-rewrite URLs. I now have 7 pages fully indexed and thousands of supplemental pages indexed by Google despite only submitting just over 700 URLs in my sitemap. I only realised there was a "disable spider sessions" option after the site had been live for a couple of months. I have waited since March to see an improvement with no joy. In September I added the mod-rewrite to re-direct the spiders when they attempt to access these SID-attached pages (spider session remover) but there has been no action yet. I have also just added an .htaccess 301 to resolve any canonical issues. I have not re-directed the index page though as I'm not sure how necessary this is.

 

The really odd thing is that since these additions Google has variously indexed 143, 124, and more recently, 12/14 pages only for them to fall away again within 2/5 days. While they are indexed I get great search returns for the products and categories on these pages.

 

If anyone has any clues as to what's going on or any advice I would be most grateful, I just want to get rid of those supplemental pages with the horrible SIDs!

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I have sessions turn off already and using ultimate SEO url.

 

I've noticed that the google spider does visit some of my product pages daily as I can see them using whos_online but when I made a note of the products and checked 2 weeks later they are still in supplemental and still cached from May which is really frustrating.

 

I think if your pages are in supplemental they are banished to the realms of Google hell never to be looked at again.

 

In other search engines my pages are being refreshed regualarly at least. It just seems the last 2 updates of Google have really messed things around

 

I thought the supplemental problem might be because the pages are too similar to each other, as its a commerce site as there are loads of products descriptions that are the similar, the only difference in the content is the colour (i.e one word in the description) and slightly different model number.

 

I've checked all my main competitors sites, they are using .asp and all their pages are in the main index (i.e appearing above my supplemental pages) and are getting refreshed regularly. So I'm not enteirely sure its to do with similar content.

 

Anyone else got any comments?

 

The only page that is updated regularly is my homepage.

 

 

 

I though

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Sorry this reply but this matter is quite important I think so I think it is worth repying in this thread aswell

 

I've had a quick look at another OSC site and it seems that they dont use the Ultimate SEO URL rewrite. He says he ranks well in google

 

I've noticed that none of their pages are in the supplemental aswell which is good as the pages rank high and get refreshed regularly.

 

After having a look at my competitors sites they all also dont use a url rewrite (e.g /productdetail.asp?productid=4323).

 

I'm beginning to wonder now after the last google update if you use the ultimate SEO contribution then commercial pages will get put in supplemental for some reason?

 

If maybe worth investigating this as I seem to be making a connection with using a URL rewrite and getting put in the supplemetal. I'm sure that my competitors used to do a url rewrite to put the title as the url and now they have changed it to just product number instead.

 

Need to ask all you Oscommerce store owners out there

 

a) If you are using Ultimate SEO contribution are most or all your pages in the supplemental?

 

b ) If not using Ultimate SEO (i.e accesing your using using the normal /product_info.php?products_id=XXX , /index.php?cPath=XX) are all your pages in the normal Google Index?

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  • 1 month later...
Sure. Find this code in product_info.php:

  $product_check = tep_db_fetch_array($product_check_query);

and add this just after it:

// Return 404 Not Found for non-existing products
 if ($product_check['total'] < 1) header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");

The page will still look the same to visitors. Only the header code is changed.

 

Regards

Jim

 

 

Hi Jim,

 

is it possible to do the same with the index.php if a categorie does not exist?

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  • 2 years later...

Google has just recently released a new type of <link> attribute. It's the rel="canonical" attribute. This attribute is used to specify a preferred domain, so that Google bots don't penalize you for duplicate content.

 

 

<link rel="canonical" href="PREFERREDURL" />

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