Looking for input: can a bad done template send me to Google hell?

[MindTwist]

I'd like some input from those around here who have been working with OSC, PHP, Google, etc for longer trhan me (after all, I have been using OSC for just about a year).

I have a working store based on OSCMAX that is very nicely found on Google search results on some given keywords I am interested. This site has a quite basic template, tables and text, no graphics (this how I usually like it). It is right now working great.
Twisted Tienda : CCTV, videovigilancia, camaras, minicamaras, seguridad - Bienvenidos a www.twistedtienda.com

Now, where my problems begin. I have kind of a copy of this store (it is actually a Multi Stores installation), both stores are running with the same engine underneath. Differences on both stores are mainly cosmetic. This store has been under construction for maybe 3 months, it was only on a new domain name, and Google had been indexing it. It was being found quite nicely on first page on some given keywords, looking great as the previous store.
SECURAME : Tu mayorista de CCTV, videovigilancia, camaras, minicamaras, seguridad - Bienvenidos a www.securame.com

It officially launched on Sep 1st, I spend the last days of august working on the store template, which until then was about the same on the first store. We had someone dessign the "look" of the store, the store name, etc, and he did about everything, header, boxes with graphical borders, etc, which then had to me moved to a BTS template/PHP/OSCMAX and so on. It had to be integrated on the store.

So it was me who had to do it, and I had never done anything like this previously (as I say, I kinda prefer a simple look, with no unnecessary graphics, I am used to things like remote desktop/VNC and I hate anything that moves or flashes on a web site without a good reason)

What I basically did was turn the boxes into a 3x3 <table>, where every <td> had its background. The header became a <table> where every tab was 3 <td>s with a given background, the central modules had a header also that was a <table> with backgounr on the <td>s. Everything looked great, but my w3c validation of course went to hell.

Now, I think that a background="" on a <table>, <td> or <tr> is not a good idea. After checking other graphical borders contributions for OSCommerce, I see that the way to do it is by having a <td> and then an <img> inside, or creating a style with backgound on your CSS, and then using it with a <td class="">

To the point, the search results on that domain dropped from one day to the other. I really could not point the exact moment/reason since there have been almost small changes, but of course the biggest change was the template switch. And the other store is still doing ok on Google, so my guess is that whatever is wrong should be template related, which is the only different part on both stores.

I was about to go back to a text template, but I think I fixed the graphics template for now, so I will wait a few days before doing so. But does it make sense that it could have dropped on Google results for those changes I did wrongly? And does it make sense that now that they are fixed it will slowly go up on results again?

Any comments are welcome, thanks!

[MindTwist]

So, nothing at all...?

[michael_s]

That would not make any difference to google. Most likely they are just reshuffling the rankings like they always do.

If you set up a google webmaster tools account, you can see any problems that google has with your site during spidering and how many pages are indexed, etc.

[JohnW]

A Google webmasters tools account will help you a lot especially when something changes in how googlebot crawls your site. There is a diagnostics page that will show you meta tag issues which will point to duplicate content that somewhat recently has become a problem for me and I think it's affecting others so you might have this problem too. Here's an examle and I'll just paste the end
c-35_105.html‎
c-35_105.html?sort=2a&page=1‎
c-35_105.html?sort=3d&page=1‎

Google is seeing these at duplicate content and that dillutes rankings, but it didn't used to crawl those like that. I had about 250 of them but I don't think your pages have that opion but it could be indexing a product and then again with the buy now button which doesn't work for it but creates duplicate content by adding this on your product url which happened to me all of a sudden earlier this year and I corrected with robots.txt.
?products_id=662&action=buy_now&sort=3a


You can find all this out with the webmast tools and more. The solution for the duplicate content involving the ? is really pretty simple and it fixes all of the problems with url's like these examples. Just put this in your robots.txt
Disallow: /*?
and your duplicate issues will start dropping off.

But, you have something else to consider for duplicate content and that's both your sites are on the same ip address and they are basically identical as far as Google is concerned so your dilluting your ranking by doing that.

One last thing is check out dnsstuff.com and run a dns report on one of your sites because it indicates several problems. I've found that site really helpful in the last year also. Good luck with this.

[MindTwist]

Thank you both, I am quite positive that there has to be something else on the ranking drop besides google just reshuffling results.

Right now when I search (Google Spain) for "mayorista videovigilancia" I am seeing myself on result 305 out of 353 relevant results, while I used to be I do not know if top 1, but on the top 3-5. I have a feeling I must have broken something, since that drop is not normal. Kinda reminds me of this thread and makes me think I am being penalized for something, so at first I thought "it has to be your new template"...

Google -30 & 950 Penalties - brief summaries

I do have a Google Webmaster Tools account, and I do not see any problems in there. I am being indexed ok, just that my results suck. It did serve me to find some problems with my meta tags and descriptions, which I fixed for the most part. The only problems I have left are with articles with more than one page (they all have the same meta tags) and with listings with more than one page (all pages have the same labels/meta tags). That should not be a big deal. My buy_now buttons do not index at all (new products, specials, featured, ... they do have the "buy now" button but with a nofollow)

My IP holds I think about another 50 OSC stores, and I do not think Google sees my two stores as duplicates. Titles are different, metas are different, keywords are different, ... Yes, they are based on the same OSCMAX installation, but there are plenty of differences amongst them. You can look at this two products, which of course are the same, but I do not think Google would take them as a duplicate just because both domains are hosted on the same IP.

Twisted Tienda : Tarjeta DVR PCI 4 entradas de video 25fps [dvr4chpci] - 23.00EUR
SECURAME : Tarjeta DVR PCI 4 entradas de video 25fps [dvr4chpci] -

I will check out dnsstuff.com , it gives me 4 errors but makes me sign up to know what they are, I will do so later today as soon as I have some time.

[MindTwist]

I have fixed all the smaller issues that were pointed to me by Google Webmaster Tools, even I am sure they would not affect me too much, they were also there before, and they are also there on the store that is doing well on Google results.

Duplicate titles, now my specials, new products, and featured product lists show a page number so the titles won't be the same:
Nuestros últimos productos en catálogo : SECURAME
Nuestros últimos productos en catálogo (Página 2) : SECURAME

Duplicate titles, my articles were being found twice because the breadcrumb added a "tpath=#" to the URL, so there were two URLs on my store which pointed to a URL that was just one. Made it sop the breadcrumb won't show the tpath. I also made my multi page articles show the page on the title/meta description:
Tarjeta DVR 4 canales 100fps - Modelo AOP-9904B : SECURAME
Tarjeta DVR 4 canales 100fps - Modelo AOP-9904B (Página 2) : SECURAME

Had a category named "others" and an article topic "others", so they both end up with the same title. Just renamed the second to "other topics":
Otros : SECURAME
Otros articulos : SECURAME

Short meta descriptions, there are several typos on /includes/meta_tags.php which mess up some META_TAG_DESCRIPTIONs, so the categories are showing with a shorter description. I'll be opening an issue on the bug tracker now (edit: 253: Typos on meta_tags.php cause some metas to be short/bad/not optimized - Bug Tracker - open source Commerce Maximized :: osCMax).

In fact TwistedTienda is showing several more small glitches than Securame, but nothing is critical.

Anyway, I do not think that has anything to do with the Google drop Securame is still seeing...

[MindTwist]

I guess I can only cry and wait.

I moved back to a text template for now, but now I am thinking that the template maybe was not what is giving me headaches:
Nuestros últimos productos en catálogo : SECURAME

With the graphical borders template, the store was basically the same but with some more code and more gfx:
Nuestros últimos productos en catálogo : SECURAME

But, what is bugging me now, when I look at Google Webmaster Tools, while I see that Googlebot last visited the main page on TwistedTienda on 9/Sep, it last did so on 22/Aug for both Securame and for my test site on TwistedReality.org ... wtf? The stats show me that there has been some crawling every day on both Securame and TwistedReality.org (with Who's Online I haven't seen google bot on any of those two domains for a while, but I am not hiting reload 24h/day on the who's online module), but GWT tell me that Googlebot hasn't visited my main page since 3 weeks ago which kinda bothers me.

I was actually already doing changes at that time, but I hadn't even started with the graphic template. And whatever I did, it is strange that it is not affecting TwistedTienda, since it is still doing more than ok on Google results.

Guess I will have to check the exact changes I did the previos days... hopefully I will find something that will enlighten me

[JohnW]

I've been pouring over webmaster tools and the related info a lot lately since things have been changing in what and how it's doing some things. I see the longer date difference on my site too where it had been a very short time frame. I thought the dns report may hold some of the answers for you but it seems that it would affect both sites equally. If you PM me your email address I'll email you the report so you don't have to sign up because it does indicate serious prolbems. I read somewhere in Google a while back that will affect ranking but that should affect both sites. I know for Adwords they openly state performance affects where you show.

Something that I think is strange is if you search SECURAME your page doesn't show up in rankings on the first page but this thread does already and a bunch of other forums and stuff. Maybe it feels these links are irrelevant and there are too many of them. I thought of that last night looking at "what googlebot sees" where some forum link references were totally irrelevant to my products. There are more googlebot changes affecting me this year for me than in the past 5 years.

[MindTwist]

Thanks JohnW, I'¡ll PM my email address to you now. I checked out dnsstuff.com , but on sign up they were asking for credit card info for the 21 days trial, so I did not finish signing up.

And yeah, searching for SECURAME did bring me up on top of the results maybe a couple of weeks ago. I was also on top with several queries related to what we sell in there, like "mayorista videovigilancia" and staff like that. Now I always have to look me up on the 200+ results whatever I am looking for... I am not sure on what I might have messed up, but both stores are basically the same except for the template.

When I saw on Google Webmaster Tools that the index page had not been visited since 22/Aug I thought that might have some relation, but I am unable to see it. When I google search Twisted Reality, first result is TwistedTienda and second is TwistedReality.org, tried some other keywords and similar results, so TwistedReality.org doesn't seem to be doing bad (at least NOT compared to Securame)

Securame was quite a "clean" word when googling before I registered the domain and started using it, so it kinda sucks to be doing as bad in Google as to even loose the first spot when I am looking for that word.

[JohnW]

In reference to meta_tags.php check out this thread
oscmax-v2-customization-mods/12083-category-description-meta-tags.html#post32563

I changed that around and it improved, but I've been manipulating it again lately and this is the current state I have this in.

  case CONTENT_INDEX_NESTED:
    $mt_category_query = tep_db_query("select categories_name, categories_description, categories_heading_title from " . TABLE_CATEGORIES_DESCRIPTION . " where categories_id = '" . (int)$current_category_id . "' and language_id = '" . (int)$languages_id . "'");
    $mt_category = tep_db_fetch_array($mt_category_query);
		$mt_categories_description = substr(strip_tags(stripslashes($mt_category['categories_description'])), 0, 150);
    define('META_TAG_TITLE', $mt_category['categories_heading_title'] . SECONDARY_SECTION . TITLE . $web_site_tagline);
	define('META_TAG_DESCRIPTION', $mt_categories_description . '...' . WEB_SITE_KEYWORDS );
	define('META_TAG_KEYWORDS', $mt_category['categories_name'] . WEB_SITE_KEYWORDS);
    break;

and

} else {
		$mt_category_query = tep_db_query ("select categories_name, categories_description, categories_heading_title from " . TABLE_CATEGORIES_DESCRIPTION . " where categories_id = '" . (int)$current_category_id . "' and language_id = '" . (int)$languages_id . "'");
		$mt_category = tep_db_fetch_array($mt_category_query);
		$mt_categories_description = substr(strip_tags(stripslashes($mt_category['categories_description'])), 0, 150);
	define('META_TAG_TITLE', $mt_category['categories_heading_title'] . SECONDARY_SECTION . TITLE . $web_site_tagline);
	define('META_TAG_DESCRIPTION', $mt_category['categories_name'] . PRIMARY_SECTION . ($mt_categories_description . '...')  . WEB_SITE_KEYWORDS);
	define('META_TAG_KEYWORDS', $mt_category['categories_name'] . WEB_SITE_KEYWORDS);

I'm still moving some things around but a good category description makes a lot of improvement.

I've moved up for several categories lately. One thing in webmaster tools is "top queries" can be misleading in its default state and I change it to "web search" and "Google US". The titles google comes up with for sitelinks also clued me into some mistakes I was making in my product and category url's.