Webshoptimizer

Last week Richardo Dacosta asked me a very interesting question:

Your contribution prevents the spiders from reading the osCsid. Would I be able to use it to prevent spiders from seeing lets say: “ref=53&affiliate_banner_id=16″ from my affiliates? if so, what do I have to do to make it work?

In my last days to my wedding, it got me thinking and finding (another) quick and dirty solution, to redirect search engines to the right URL without the affiliate references. This way links from affiliate websites add up to your original (product) page!

Read on: Canonical contribution Affiliate edition

Ok, I did it (well, sort of). Here is a beta (or better: proof of concept) for the new tag which tells the search engines Google, Yahoo! and Live which URL it should have for the current page. Matt Cutts (software engineer at Google) explains the new canonical tag:

The syntax is pretty simple: An ugly url such as http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265 can specify in the HEAD part of the document the following:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/page.html"/>

That tells search engines that the preferred location of this url (the “canonical” location, in search engine speak) is http://example.com/page.html instead of http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265 .

What can it do for my webshop?
If search engines find the same content on irregular/different URL, the page/content will be marked as “duplicate content”. This is a common mistake which you want to avoid since you want to have all your pages indexed properly. However, there are some factors that can lead to several URL’s for one page.
Canonical tag for your osCommerce webshop…

If you have your own shop, you are on top of numbers. In order to serve your customers better you give them as much as you possibly can in terms like service, product information and product suggestions. Since the most valuable numbers can be collected in Google Analytics (like amount of visitors, keywords and general e-commerce tracking) this contribution adds even more valuable information to Analytics.

Collect what your visitors search for
To spot trends early it’s a good idea to track the search queries of your visitors. This allows you to catch misspellings or related items with an high demand. With this information you can e.g. put common misspellings in the description of an item or start selling related products to items you already sell.

A few contributions already allowed you to track search queries, but most of them collected them in the administrator panel. To keep the administrator as clean as possible, you want to collect information in a environment capable and designed for tracking information. Google Analytics suits this job. Therefor you can find your visitors search queries from your shop back in your Analytics account.

How does it work? Read on!

If you run a web shop you probably have the problem that now and then have the problem some products are unavailable or out of stock.

You can comfort your customers by back ordering the product or offering them equivalent product. Unfortunately this will not enhance the overall conversion rate of your website simply because you can’t offer your customer exactly where he is looking for (at that time).
That’s a pity: no conversion, no revenue, no profit.

What if you had a creative solution that would offer your customer a good alternative and would give you some nice extra revenue without having it in stock or available?

Read how you can have an income with any stock…

Always wanted to know which websites in your country have the most authority on the internet?

This clever trick will show it instantly. The ingredients: A web browser.
Open your web browser and point it to Google. Choose a country of the Google website you want to check the authority for – e.g. Google.nl for the Netherlands or Google.co.uk to check the websites with the most authority in the United Kingdom.

Now, to find the websites with the most authority all you have to do is search for www. So, do a search for www in Google and voila, Google will come up with the results. The resulting websites are the ones with the most authority for that specific country. Maximum coolex!

Why would these results come up for the www search query?
See how you can find the most authoritative domains…