posted on May 29, 2015 06:43:12 PM new
I understand that to maximize a Vendio seller's use of Google is involved and something I will be tackling soon.
But my question today is very specific relating to something I (or Vendio) is doing incorrectly (most probably me.)
I sell dvds. I took one of the dvd titles, added 'vendio' and ran a Google search, to wit: "Playboy~1997 Video Playmate Calendar dvd vendio".
Of course, Amazon shows first but midway down the first page, I come up twice.
But whereas the clickable title for Amazon on the page is "Amazon.com: Playboy: 1997 Playmate Calendar: Victoria ...", in other words what you might expect, one of my clickable titles reads "2 - </centerd" and the other reads, "</centerd - Free Shopping Cart". These clickables do bring up my Vendio store but not the specific item.
I can't figure out where Google came up with those clickable titles. I searched the html on the dvd page for "</centerd", and then went through the html's within my Vendio store wizard, Not there.
Somewhere the Google crawler is reading an incorrect html command (</centerd) or truncating some existing line within my code or Vendio's code (it does reference 'free shopping cart'.)
Where does the Google crawler go for the title of an item within a Vendio store? How can I get Google to read the proper title? Am I not putting the title in the right place?
posted on June 5, 2015 11:34:11 AM new
As per the information we found while researching about this on Google (https://www.google.com/search/about/insidesearch/howsearchworks/crawling-indexing.html), they look at the web as an ever-growing public library with billions of books and no central filing system. Google essentially gathers the pages during the crawl process and then creates an index, so we know exactly how to look things up. Much like the index in the back of a book, the Google index includes information about words and their locations. When you search, at the most basic level, our algorithms look up your search terms in the index to find the appropriate pages.
The search process gets much more complex from there. When you search for “dogs” you don’t want a page with the word “dogs” on it hundreds of times. You probably want pictures, videos or a list of breeds. Google’s indexing systems note many different aspects of pages, such as when they were published, whether they contain pictures and videos, and much more. With the Knowledge Graph, we’re continuing to go beyond keyword matching to better understand the people, places and things you care about.
It appears the Google's indexing system follows algorithms and it is difficult to predict what the crawler shows up even though the title is in the right place.
Hope this helps, please feel free to reply if you have any more questions.
I appreciate that the given output of a Google algorithm may not coincide with what I had in mind when I composed the page. Google's crawler will do what it will do.
Part of my original question was questioning their result as opposed to how they arrived at it.
Do you have any idea where, within Vendio's html, they extracted "</centerd" and "</centerd - Free Shopping Cart", terms which were in place of my item's title.
Because the "titles" Google came up with are incorrect html commands, and incorrect commands usually just get printed out on the target page, perhaps these incorrect terms are displayed on your end.
Since the 'free shopping cart' is something the crawler glommed onto, perhaps a perusal of the html area that deals with promoting a free shopping cart on Vendio would reveal a bad code which the crawler latched onto.
As an aside, since my original posting, the titles of some of the dvds in the Playboy store category have displayed correctly on Google.
Naturally, I then compared the Playboy pages with the others but, since I use the same template for all, I could find no difference.
Ultimately, there may be no answer that I can act on but I still have to ask. Nothing ventured nothing gained,
posted on June 10, 2015 04:05:36 PM new
Thank you for your reply. Google use their proprietary algorithms for the crawler and unfortunately it is not possible for us to predict where, within Vendio's html, the crawler extracts the content that gets displayed on the search result.
Please feel free to reply if you have any more questions.
posted on June 13, 2015 03:47:31 PM new
Just two final questions on this, Sunil.
By the way, I am not listing anywhere other than my Vendio store.
When I first joined Vendio many years ago, Vendio offered a free Google service (I don't recall the extent of the service,) I stopped being active on Vendio for about 3-4 years (illness) and when I got back not too long ago, Vendio informed me that Google was now charging for the same or similar service.
I asked Google and they said they said that my items would be included in a search - and if they weren't getting picked up, I could ask Google to crawl it. They say crawling is automatic and free. What am I missing? Any thoughts?
My other question has to do with SMIE. I just noticed that under "Items To Edit" > "Name, SKU & UPC/ISBN/EAN", Vendio's "tip" says that including the UPC aids Google and Yahoo in finding the item.
When I do enter the UPC in the UPC box, I find it doesn't appear on the item's finished page in my Vendio store even though I entered it in SMIE. Would you suggest I add it to "Default subtitle" or in the item's description? Does it matter?
Thanks for your help, Sunil. After being away so long, I feel a bit at sea so any further assistance would be much appreciated.
posted on June 16, 2015 03:23:55 PM new
Thank you for your reply. Here is the link from Google that explains the whole Crawling process, and gives you an idea of how the Google crawler behaves - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182072?hl=en, hope this helps you.
And yes, you can get the UPC information to show up on your Vendio store listing by adding it to the default subtitle field.
Please feel free to reply if you have any more questions.
