" Google kicked out my yahoo store!"

I just finished talking to a client who told me that he had his yahoo store item related keywords among top ten results on google search. He seemed to be pretty concerned about what wrong may have happened. When I browsed on his yahoo store pages, I found many problem areas related to google searchbot. Here are the few of them:

1. Hidden Text: Found two lines underneath the final-text area. Carrying so many store related keywords. For all of you who cant really avoid the hidden text, why dont we use a light grey color for that instead of white?

2. Doorway Pages: 5 of them using the Raw-html type. Linking back to the home page. Carrying no other links. It is always a good idea if you can create a content stories of about 400-500 words on the doorway or special pages which has link to the yahoo store section or item pages instead of just linking to the home page.

3. Javascript: Too Much javascript and css text on the head tags could be one reason. The javascript was about opening a popup page about the store annoucements. Well the function was being called popup. I am not sure if googlebot took this function name too seriously but the javascript iteself must have been. Moving everything in javascript or css into a file whopuld have been a better option.

4. Redirect to the Offer Page: This is a 100% NO-NO for google. Do not have any sneaky meta tag related or javascript redirect to the store. This applies to the doorway pages, landing pages, homepages on the web hosting side of your merchant solution package too.

5. Missing Content: Too little description on the item pages could be one reason.

6. Missing Robots Meta Tag: It is always better to let the googlebot find its way from the path specified by the robots .txt file. You can always add this meta tag in the head-tags variable

< meta name="robots" content="ALL" >
< meta name="robots" content="INDEX,FOLLOW" >

This tells the googlebot or any other search engine spider to look deeper into the linked pages on that particular page.

7. No Headline Text: Google does a great job in reading headlines. All the text which appears in h1, h2, h3 or h4 tags looks interesting to google crawler and is a must tool for google SEO


Btw, Ever wondered how a page looks to the spider?

Try this free service called Poodle Predictor at http://www.gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go.

This tells you how your site appears to the googlebot.

So, we need to be extra careful not to spam google when it comes to seo. Some of the listed things above may have no impact to other search engines like yahoo or msn, but a balanced approach is what we need when it comes to Search Engine Optimization