Security

First and foremost make sure your Zen Cart is fully patched! No exceptions. Your Zen Cart you just downloaded and installed still needs these.

Now, do these items on Zen Cart’s recommended security list. On this list please ignore the following. If you choose to do these things, your robots.txt cannot be accessed and the php command will not work properly for you in most server environments.

#.htaccess to prevent unauthorized directory browsing or access to .php
files
IndexIgnore */*
<Files *.php>
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
</Files>
#add the following to protect against people discovering what version your
spiders.txt file is
<Files *.txt>
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
</Files>

Now, lets add some cool stuff to help you stay safe.

Tip #1: Use strong passwords for everything! Change them every 30 days.

Tip #2: When renaming your admin DO NOT use any admin or business related
term. Try banana for example, something like manage, control or anything XXadmin is a dead guess for most hackers to discover your admin directory.

Tip #3: Make sure all admins have their OWN accounts and install this module to track their access more conveniently.

Tip #4: Protect your admin directory with an additional auth when possible. Perhaps you can password protect the directory or allow access by IP address for example.

# password-protect the directory
AuthType basic
AuthName "This directory is protected"
AuthUserFile /home/path/.htpasswd
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
Require valid-user

# deny all except
<Limit GET POST PUT>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from 192.168.1.1
allow from .*domain\.com.*
</Limit>

Tip #5: Protect ALL directories from browsing with an index.html file. This file can be blank, it just prevents the directory from displaying in an index to browse. If a folder has an index.anything… It’s protected.

Tip #6: Protect your images directories (all) with the following .htaccess to prevent browsing, executing php files and more. These directories will also need an index file. When done, login to your hosting control panel and change the permissions on both the index.html and .htaccess files to 444 to prevent modification.

#PRO-Webs ver 1.8 1/2010
#Prevent directory viewing and the ability of any scripts to run.
#While a bit overkill this file prevents a wide array of access and executions
#of known exploits in your Zen Cart
#This file and a index.html should have the chmod 444
#This low setting allowance differs from server to server and should be set as
#low as possible and no higher that 644
#Permissions this low will likely need set in filemanager
#Place this in all images directories except BMZ_Cache
Options -ExecCGI -Indexes
IndexIgnore *
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} libwww [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.*)=http [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [F,L]
<Files .htaccess>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</Files>
<Files ~ "\.php$">
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</Files>
chmod .htaccess files 444

Tip #7: If you have an SSL force all of your admin pages to load in only secured urls with the following htaccess code.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /admin_dir/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://domain.com/admin_dir/$1 [R,L]

Tip #8: Make sure your cache folder has the correct index.php and .htaccess. Download a fresh version of Zen Cart and upload them to be sure. Now CHMOD, change the permissions of these to 444.

I may be adding to this, as we are always testing… so stay tuned.

Compete.com has released a very interesting study that all ecommerce store owners should read. This study polled online shoppers about where the look for items to buy, how they shop and what they shop for. I think that although the results may seem as expected… the missing element is how it applies to your business, and what growth in the particular metric you might expect in the future.

Let’s kick this off with polled data …

“How frequently do you use the following tools when shopping online?”

Note the green and red areas where I have noted what I believe to be expected growth/decline of these metrics in the coming year.

I think, and this is my own opinion (take it or leave it), that the areas noted will grow or decline for many reasons, not withstanding the new push among search engines for real time results and the weight they do and will carry in the future.

Coupon sites will continue to grow as they continue to gain authority and social media love from their users… As they rank better, they will be used more frequently. Look for many of these higher ranking sites to start offering “premium” paid types services and exposure.

Emails advertising I believe will decline for a good many reasons, mostly because people are generally irritated by spam mail. Shoppers are even afraid to create accounts on websites for “fear of spam”. Secondly, your email shoppers are far more likely to be a one hit wonder. They shop for price and have little or no loyalty…. IMPULSE

Product reviews is a tricky one…. and while they can be very effective, I believe they will soon be so abused that no one will trust them. Face it, how do you know a “real shopper” said that instead of a savvy marketer? You don’t, and just like many other diseases the web has caused, “fear of fake reviews” will in my opinion join the “fear of shipping” eBay disease in record time.

Shopping comparison sites and portals will continue to grow. Here shoppers can get what appears to be a fair representation of products to compare, see and get information about them in a comfortable… No pressure setting. Everyone will have a favorite, and we will see these continue to grow.

Social networking for ecommerce is still a baby, but expect its effectiveness to grow. Right now for **most ecommerce sites, this is just something you do. However, as we see the decline of reviews and other sharing platforms like gift tagging, this will become the safe way to ask a friend about a product they bought, or compare products for sharing. People on Facebook will seem more “real” and believable, thus more effective. Niche sites are already and will continue to kick ass here!

While I realize that this is completely off topic, I really wanted to share it. This example is about sportsmanship, a VERY good example of what young people can do… If allowed and inspired to do so.

In the NCAA Division II girls softball playoffs, Western Oregon senior Sara Tucholsky, who had NEVER hit a home run before the second inning of the second double header against Central Washington popped one over the fence. Sara, who was incredibly excited to hit her first home run, in a playoff game no less, accidentally overran first base. She turned back to touch the bag and in doing so twisted her right knee and it gave out… Landing her on the ground at first base.

Wait for it…. This is amazing!

Sara was pretty severely injured and would be unable to continue her celebratory first time trip around the bases for a home run ever. Team coaches and trainers could not touch Sara or she would be out at first. If they brought in a pinch runner Sara’s home run would become as a two run single instead.

Opposing team Central Washington senior Mallory Holtman, realized the situation for senior Sara, and inquired to the umpires and coaches if they could carry her around the bases, having Sara touch each base. The umpires and coaches, while astounded, agreed that this would in fact be “legal”.

So Mallory and teammate Liz Wallace quickly picked Sara up, carefully touching her foot down on each bag, and carried her around the bases to get her home run counted as such.

Image from Values.com

While Central Washington lost the game, they had completed one of the most selfless acts of human kindness and sportsmanship I have ever hear of. So while off topic, from one veteran softball player to another… Hats off ladies, you are incredible people and you hold in your hearts the true spirit of the game…. Congratulations.

Are you feeling that “spring is coming” bug? Well, rightfully so, because right now is the time to plan for your spring marketing and tidy up a bit from the winter sales.

Most ecommerce stores have some season trending. This is very unique to both the store and the product line. So a store selling green widgets can be expected to trend sales in a similar manner to another shop selling green widgets… But not exactly, as they are many additional metrics that influence one’s sales.

So you should be planning for your spring and early summer products, marketing and trends now… So that you are prepared for this period in your business. Even especially if traditionally spring is a low volume period for sales.

Here is a checklist of sorts to help you get started for planning any marketing period, including this spring.

Trending: Unless you site is brand new, you should have some sales and traffic data that you can use to trend or predict the data for the upcoming period. I tend to concentrate on sales and traffic. I use both as they can be very unrelated for some websites. There are clearly some periods where even if the traffic is there, conversions are down… So to properly trend our potential for this upcoming period we should use both. You may even have other metrics such as, bounce, average order or similar that are specifically a target for your store.

Gathering the data is the easiest part, as you should be using a proper analytical stat program to record your data. We will use Google Anayltics for our example, as it is very popular.

When gathering your data, we are looking for specific trends within the matching period from previous years to predict, affect and produce a proper marketing plan for the upcoming period. So login to Google Analytics and lets get to work.

So we will pull data for all of March, April, May and June to cover our bases and provide some overlap. You will want to pull at least on year, more if you have them. I would not be concerned with using more than 3 years as things in your business and on the web change very quickly and it’s not likely to be very relevant any longer.

The example store I am using had a 2009 average daily visits of 279 uniques a day. There conversion rate for the year was 3.87%. You can see by the graph that holiday traffic is a crucial part of this store’s success and that spring is rather soft by comparison. You can also see that our spring period it right at or just a bit above average for them.

2009 Unique Visits

We can clearly see from this data, that traffic could be improved for this period…. Especially because they have a genuine promotable product line for spring sales. Now let’s have a look at conversions in relationship with this traffic… Do they convert well in this period?

2009 Conversions

We can see that last year, while traffic was average, they converted pretty well the end part of spring. looks very much like March should be our focus area.

Next you will determine your trend. You can use data from previous tears to do this… But if you lack that data no worries, this old restaurant manager has the equation to get you close.

Obviously, any data you do have is clearly relevant… But let’s say you have little or none. To determine your current rate of growth in both of these metrics we will poll the last 4 months. This is a weighted process with the greatest weight on the most recent data.

This applies to any metric. Gather the data for these metrics for Nov 2009, Dec 2009, Jan 2010 and Feb 2010.

We will start with March’s data from last year 8,043 unique visits and a conversion rate of 3.13%.

• Nov 2009 8,789 & 4.85%
• Dec 2009 14634 & 4.5%
• Jan 2010 7,604 & 3.67%
• Feb 2010 6,395 & 3.52%

For this purpose, with holiday data so much higher we will exclude Nov & Dec, unless we have 2008 numbers… Which we do. Nov 2008 7,419 & 3.18%, Dec 2008 8,861 & 4.00%, Jan 2009 6,146 & 2.99% and Feb 2009 5,742 & 3.22%.

Here is the math:

The math is easier than it looks….

Step 1: YOY growth, which is simply current year minus previous year.

Step 2: Trend. Like I said we will weight this for the most current monthly data. So 100% being the whole, we will use 12.5% from Nov & Dec, 25% from Jan and the remaining 50% from most current Feb. Something like this:

• 1 part : Nov. 18.49% plus Dec. 65.15% = 83.64 divided by 2 = 41.82%
• 1 part: Jan. = 23.72%
• 1 part: Feb. =11.37%
• 1 part: Feb. =11.37%

= The whole (88.28) divided by 4 = (22.07%) Current Trend

Last year March (8043) apply trend 22.07% = (1775 growth) This year March forecast (9818) unique visits… Into 318 average daily visits.

Check our math:

Last year average daily visits March = 260

This year forecast = 318

% of predicted growth = 22.3%

**Note that rounding changes these just a hair, but not to worry this should be pretty reliable data.

So this “math” can be applied to the entire period as a whole, or each month individually computed. The point here is to have an idea of what to expect, AND and basis to measure the effectiveness of your marketing this spring. For example if you did nothing last spring, and you know (above) what to expect if you do nothing this spring… Then you have a pretty good benchmark to measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign this spring.

Merchant Processing Survival Tips 2010

If you haven’t read about the new “Brand Damaging” issues and you accept credit cards on your website… You need to. The potential impact on your business is too large to ignore.

Now that you have hopefully informed yourself, let’s concentrate on keeping you out of trouble and getting canceled.

The new rules may seem a bit daunting, but they are really pretty simple…. If it’s trickery, you cannot do it anymore. You may be sitting there thinking, “I have been running this “Free Money” website for 10 years…. This doesn’t apply to me. You are most certainly wrong. These are new rules, new implementations and new punishments for violations.

The cost for violating one of these rules and getting caught (and you will) is at it’s best cancellation of your merchant account or gateway account…. At it’s worst, very large fines and cancellation. Heed this warning, even if you haven’t received any communication from your Merchant services providers.

Merchant Processing Survival Tips 2010

Online marketing campaigns that employ any “Free-Trial”, “Deferred Billing” and/or “Shipping Only” are considered trial offers and are subject to the new rules. Consumers must receive a tangible good or contracted service in exchange for the credit card charge(s). Incentive type discount offers are acceptable ONLY when the cardholder is receiving goods or services in exchange for payment. Having said this, note for example that e-Online will no longer support

accounts engaging in hidden or delayed charges and ‘free’ offers that are not truly free.

1. Avoid using  “free” or “risk free” language on your website and in marketing campaigns (including PPC) .. Unless it is 100% really free.
2. If you use the “Pay Shipping & Handling Only” technique, then these charges must be fair, reasonable and fully disclosed. So if you have been slipping by on the $5 shipping and $20 handling fee, you must stop. Also note that inflating your actual shipping has additional implications as well… Did you know that most states expect you to pay sales tax on overcharged shipping fees?
3. Trial offers need to be no less than 10 days and the trial period should not begin until product is shipped to the consumer or the service has begun. You are not permitted to offer trails with exemptions, filtering or special rules for age, weight, height, geographic location, race etc.
4. Avoid creating a false sense of urgency because if the matter is not genuinely urgent you are in violation. For example if you have the “10 day only” message running on your website for 3 years now… You are in violation. These periods of offers must be genuine and accurate. e-Online has strictly forbid the use of  applications such as countdown clocks, tickers, or language such as “Offer Expires Today!”, for example already.
5. By mandate of the FTC, product claims, promises, guarantees and research claims MUST be accurate and proper. This is pretty unlimited and includes testimonials, endorsements and even product reviews. Don’t think for one second that user supplied product reviews are exempt… It is your website right? Not only do you risk loss of merchant services with these issues, but the FTC can fine 11K on top of whatever the credit card companies may choose to fine you for your “Brand Damaging” behavior.
6. How about the FTC’s new rules for pricing? Prices must be within reasonable “fair market value”. Any negative options must be clearly disclosed, and you cannot bill for any product or service that the shopper/consumer did not knowingly purchase… Including things like upgrades and software updates, for example.
7. If you have a special offer which includes some shady marketing like exclusions or negative options you are required to have that customer agree to the terms twice before charging them.

The first validation can take place with the initial offer presentation prior to submission of credit card information, and the second during the checkout process. The confirmation order page must also require consumers to acknowledge that they agree to the Terms & Conditions and authorize the merchant to charge the credit card for the disclosed dollar amount. Terms must be displayed adjacent to the “submit”, “confirm” or any other “call to action” button confirming the order. The price must be within 100 pixels of the “submit”, “confirm” or any other “call to action” button.

• Shipping and Handling should not be billed separate from charges for the product or service.
• Terms must be in a minimum 12-point “easy to read” font.
• Avoid visually distracting graphics from the display of terms.
• Pre-checked boxes must never be used.
• Consumers should be required to actively and individually select each offer or bonus during the checkout process when there are multiple offers or up sells presented. No offers or up sells should be pre–selected or pre-checked.
• Consumers should not be able to move forward in the offer or checkout until the box acknowledging the terms is checked.
• Verbiage must clearly disclose the enrollment into an ongoing membership with no distraction. An example of an acceptable disclosure is: “By clicking “Submit” you acknowledge that you understand you are being enrolled in a 10 day trial for $4.95, and after expiration of the 10 day trial period you will be charged $59 per month until you cancel your service”
• All products or services purchased when the call-to-action button is clicked should be billed as a single charge unless the order is fulfilled at different times requiring multiple charges.

REFUND POLICIES

Merchants must not make it difficult for consumers to exercise the disclosed cancellation procedures and all cancellation requests must be honored in accordance with the stated terms of the transaction.

1. Refund policies must be disclosed prior to the sale completion. Establish a clear, concise statement of your refund and credit policy. Your policy should be consistent with the objectives of your business and the products or services sold.
2. Merchants must not require return of any trial offer product samples in order for the consumer to receive a refund, or cancel their ongoing subscription.
3. “Full Money Back” or “Full Satisfaction” guarantees are considered false and prohibited unless the offer provides a full refund on all products, including but not limited to Shipping & Handling charges.
4. Refunds should be for the full amount charged including shipping and handling
5. All future billing to a customer should be canceled when a refund is issued.

All future billing to a customer should be canceled when a chargeback is received.

RESOURCES:

The FTC has published the regulations along with many resources online for businesses and consumers like yourself to learn and understand the new regulations.  A few helpful links provided by e-online are included below:

Commercial Practices Part 425, Use of Prenotification Negative Option Plans

Prenotification Negative Option Plans

Advertising and Marketing on the Internet

Dot Com Disclosures

Direct Response industry publications have provided articles with some clarification regarding these guidelines:

http://www.responsemagazine.com/resources/legal-resources/legal-review-getting-strict-with-negative-option-marketing-1351

http://www.dmnews.com/get-comfortable-with-new-ftc-regs/article/136023/

So, are you scared?

If you have been utilizing these techniques, then you probably should be. Realize that the allowable fines and penalties for violations of these rules can mean the death of many if not most small businesses. On the lighter side, even receiving the cancellation email from a merchant provider, allowing you a very short 2 weeks to make other arrangements for processing or gateway services is enough to put you in the poor house.

Take heed, learn and understand these practices, and when in doubt contact your merchant providers… speak with someone in underwriting and have them look at your website and marketing materials and provide you the correct way to market your products…. Before the axe falls.

Easy SEO, this is a term as similar as black and white.

Easy SEO?

More to the point, you saw this title and thought I was going to give you some easy trick to make your shop rank so you can be rich. Not so, this is rather a rant, some things that just need said. You can benefit from the content of this post if you are determined to succeed in your ecommerce business, and you have some common sense. If so, please read on…

First lets tackle something no one seems to know. What is SEO?

SEO is a very mechanical, analytical and hands on discipline. SEO is a part of marketing (SEM), but is not marketing, rather SEO is just as the acronym suggests… Search engine optimization.

SEO itself is a method/practice of making your website better accessible to the search engines, mechanically sound, optimizing page structure, content and elements, website architecture, flow and navigation and server side scripting as well.

Rank itself is the goal, but making both your content and website easily understood and navigated by the search engines is the process. The things we do are generally based on 3 things. Things we know. Things we see proper research to prove. And things we believe to be true and are testing.

None of these things we do is anything automated or really easy. This is definitely hard work. The hard work involved comes in a few forms. For example building great content regularly is hard work, building quality inbound links is hard work… But most of all, reading enough so that you have a clue and can participate in the decisions for your SEO campaign is also hard work.

So that leaves basically 2 sets of website owners… Those who do, and those who don’t.

Those who do seek to optimize their own websites are very vulnerable, for many reasons. They often set out and read on the internet about the SEO they need, implement it blindly as fact without support or merit and then fail to measure the results. These individuals then proceed to propagate this disease by sharing their ill founded and unsupported techniques with others just as vulnerable. For these folks I have some advise.

1. Know your sources. I could put up a website tomorrow offering a 5 minute solution to all of your SEO needs for $200 and sell these lies to the masses with ease. Just because I say something, does not make it true. I could get away with this because most have their heads wrapped around easy and fail to search out any supporting documentation or support for anything that looks to make SEO easy.
2. SEO cannot be automated. Even if every search algorithm factor was laid out for you in a to do list, you could not automate your SEO. Every website is different, the only way to properly succeed in your SEO campaign is to read, understand, test and measure the results. Anything less is just a reckless waste of time.
3. Common sense. If I tell you your website will rank if you make it all yellow, do you believe me? At the end of the day, your success will be determined on your ability to make good decisions. Now if you haven’t taken the time to seek out the reading and education you need for these decisions, then at least use common sense.

Those who do not, are equally at risk, just in a different manner. There are many reasons website owners seek out a professional to provide their SEO, unfortunately most of these reasons are what make them destined to fail. If you think that paying someone for SEO will answer all of your goals without you lifting a finger, you are mistaken. If you think you will require no knowledge of the techniques because you are paying someone, you are also mistaken.

Website owners blindly paying for SEO they do not understand are running around with a big bulls eye on their foreheads. You are not only vulnerable, but the cost can be both failure and cash! So I have some advise for those that do not as well…

1. Do not pay someone for SEO if you haven’t checked them out. Do they use a gmail email address? Do you think that is professional? Is their own site well constructed, easy to navigate and ranking? Can you call them on the phone and have a discussion?
2. Ask questions. If your paid SEO cannot/will not answer your questions regarding technique, services etc… Then they are likely jerking you around. Ask questions, do some reading and then ask better questions.
3. Why are you paying me? You may think this is in contrast to #2, but I assure you it is not. If your SEO tells you you need more content, you do some research and are still confused, then perhaps you should just do what they say. You are paying them for their professional services, correct?
4. Cost. If you are paying a low amount of money for an SEO who has said they will do everything and you need to do nothing, you are getting screwed. This type of service in my opinion is not only impossible, but would be very expensive (in the thousands of dollars a month). The reason this is veritably impossible is that this SEO person needs your input and niche specific expertise to create and execute a successful SEO campaign for you. No person, SEO or pretending professional can know every product, niche and service well enough to proceed without your involvement.
5. If they guarantee you rank, they are lying. SEOs do not work for Google, Bing or any other search engine. There is no way for any legitimate SEO to make you a guarantee of rank. It’s just frankly a snake oiled lie to get in your pockets.

Easy SEO Summary

• There is NO easy SEO.
• SEO cannot be automated.
• SEO is hard work.
• SEO requires common sense and research.
• There is no plugin, module or magic dust that will make you rank.
• If you make changes without analysis, you have failed.
• No one can provide comprehensive SEO services without your involvement.
• Rank guarantees are outright lies.
• Use your head, check people out.

So this means, those of you seeking out the quick get rich SEO trick are pissing up a rope… The very rope that will be used to hang your website out to dry.

Ranking Factors

SEOMoz’s 2009 Search Ranking Factors survey uses a collective polling of some top names in SEO, including Aaron Wall, Michael Gray, Jill Whalen, Rand Fishkin, Vanessa Fox  and 67 additional top industry contributors who are invited to give their opinion regarding the weight of algorithmic factors for natural search in 2009.

The value of this report for the average website owner is huge, for me it is both highly valuable and thought provoking information, and some redemption as well.

Google and the other search engines use a highly complicated, algorithmic math program to analyze and rank websites in organic search. These algorithms are not made publicly available, thus SEO’s, like myself spend most of our time testing theories and analyzing statistics in order to develop effective SEO campaigns.

2009 was a pretty tumultuous year for organic search, all three of the top search engines made huge changes to their algorithms and we also saw the launch of Bing. These events made significant changes in the way we think and optimize websites. Fact is, 2010 is already looking to be an even bigger year of changes and SEO’s will need to keep their ears to the ground to keep up and be successful.

If I had to pick a phrase to best describe SEO, it would be:

Analyze, adapt and overcome

Top 5 2009 Ranking Factors

1. Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links (73% very high importance): This is simply other websites linking out to you with good anchor text. Anchor text is the visually click-able part of the link. We want to see links such as “SEO Services” opposed to “Click Here” to add the proper weight to the link. I personally strongly agree with this opinion from the panel, but would add that the surrounding text of the link, or lack of text is probably just as important. So essentially a link list is not nearly as effective as a link in the middle of a related paragraph for example.
2. External Link Popularity quantity/quality of external links (71% very high importance): This ranking factors hasn’t changed too much, basically, more links are better… More of the better links are substantially better. What makes a link better? Links from trusted, authoritative or seed sites carry more weight, links from topically related pages and domains carry more weight and more is still better. I very much agree with this and would add only that, getter better links is far more important than the number of links.
3. Diversity of Link Sources links from many unique root domains (67% very high importance): This means that for example, 10K links from different pages in the same domain is not as effective as 10K links from 10,000 different domains. You will hear many say that Google only “counts” one link from each domain, and while I disagree, I will say that they are severely discounted. So I agree with this finding as well and you should be seeking out as many backlinks from different domain sources as you can to get the most from your link building efforts.
4. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag (66% very high importance): Your title tag is not a Meta tag, but rather an element tag in the <head> of your pages. This is the information between the <title> tags and what generally displays in your browser tab heading as well. Your title tag and its relevance to the page’s content is hands down the number 1 on page ranking factor. Proper use of keywords in this element carries a great deal of weight. The more relevant the tag to the page’s content, the more weight. Additionally note that the first words (left to right) are also given a bit more weight that the words further right. I strongly agree and this is probably your best time spent with your on page optimization.
5. Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted (66% very high importance): This is a little more difficult to understand, but essentially, just like PageRank, your distance from the trusted domain also factors as a degrade in weight/score. So if I have a page about “Green Bananas” and I have a link from GreenBananas.com that is best, but if GreenBananas.com links to FreshBananas.com who links to me, the weight is less. I very strongly agree with this, but conclude that most people are not able to determine what a trusted domain is. So for the sake of application, shop owners should concentrate on topically related links.

There are quite a few more ranking factors that were polled and we have found some additional tools for shop owners in these as well.

• Keyword Use in the Root Domain Name (e.g. keyword.com): Without being spammy, hard to spell or easily confused, using a keyword in your domain name is a very effective tool. Avoid dashes, non-phonetic words, number/letter substitution and urbanized spellings… But yes, clean short domain names that carry a keyword will give you a leg up.
• Keyword Use Anywhere in the H1 Headline Tag: The very first heading tag on your page should be an <h1>. Proper, not spammy use of keywords in this tag carry some weight and should be executed by shop owners. Note that a heading tag logically describes the content right below it, and thus another on page factor of importance…. Most important as close to the top of the page as you can achieve, is given more weight than the content after/below it. (Keyword Use in the First 50-100 Words in HTML on the Page)
• Existence of Substantive, Unique Content on the Page: Uniqueness! Is your page’s content duplicated elsewhere on the web, including your own site? Is there enough page unique content to allow the page to be considered unique within your template’s repetitive textual content? Using the manufacturers description is probably the biggest mistake we see here, it’s duplicate. Additionally, products and categories without a decent amount of unique text are duplicate with your own pages.
• Recency (freshness) of Page Creation: This is one I have been preaching for over a year. Google especially, wants to know that the lights are on AND someone is home. Set your mind and schedule to create at least a new page a week.
• Use of Links on the Page that Point to Other URLs on this Domain: Are you linking to yourself with good anchor text? How about your category menu, those are links too. Most effective internal linking will come from links to specific pages within a body of textual content.
• Historical Content Changes (how often the page content has been updated): Your Zen Cart helps you a great deal already with this, by displaying changing content features in your pages…. But updating your pages frequently helps you rank.
• Blogging and Engagement with the Blogosphere: Blogs are a very highly effective means of both delivering and maintaining fresh content… add the link bait factor and this becomes a must have tool for every shop owner in 2009 and more so in 2010!

Here are some comments on these factors from panelists you may find very interesting:

Russell Jones – If Google only ranked the “tried and true”, their results would be old and outdated. Recency is a valuable asset when links are hard to come by.

Andy Beal – Keyword use in external link anchor text is one of the top SEO factors overall. I’ve seen sites rank for competitive keywords—without even mentioning the keyword on-page—simply because of external link text.

Andy Beard – Keyword Use in the Meta Keywords Tag – ignore them unless using a blogging platform which can use the same keywords as tags. Google ignores them.

Christine Churchill – Taking the time to create a good title tag has the biggest payoff of any on-page criteria. Just do it!

Peter Wailes – Domain name keyword usage gains most of its strength through what anchor text people are then likely to link to you with, not so much from inherent value, which is lower in my opinion.

Peter Meyers – Anecdotally, it feels like freshness is more important than ever. I’m amazed how often a blog post ranks within the first day, holding a top-10 position before finally settling a few spots (or even pages) lower.

Ann Smarty – Domain strength is a highly important factor (still). We keep seeing pages with 0 strength of their own hosted on reputable domains ranked very high for very competitive words.

Ian Lurie – Use of Adsense/Google Apps/Google Search or other search engine-owned tools, though, won’t impact results at all. If your site is so hurting, SEO-wise, that you have to point an Adwords ad at it to get crawled, you’ve got bigger problems.

Adam Audette – CTR on a search result is a large cumulative factor, and brings in page load time as well, which is something we’re very focused on at present.

You know, it’s funny… At least our customers find it humorous, but most of the SEO you need is really common sense. Imagine if Google was your business, what kind of websites would you want to deliver your searchers (customers)? Hard work, lite reading and an overall drive to be successful are exactly what every shop owner needs to succeed. If someone told you this was going to be easy….. They lied!

Ecommerce Blogging

The need for “fresh” content has sent many shop owners looking for a blog. We have built many WordPress Blogs for shop owners in the last few months…. shop owners who realize the need to deliver content in a more effective manner. So today I want to give you some tips for looking at your planned or existing ecommerce blog.

First off, no offense meant to other blogging software… But I highly recommend WordPress. The features, speed and ease of use is the perfect match for most shop owner’s needs. Add the awesome widgets and other tools to take full advantage of your content for social media, and you have the perfect application for your online store’s blog.

Caution number 1…. I do NOT recommend that you host your blog anywhere else except your OWN DOMAIN. Something store.com/blog is perfect! Subdomains are redundant and unnecessary as well… They are in fact viewed as folders by Google and not a separate site anyhow. Host your own blog as the content is far more valuable to your business than any link from it hosted elsewhere.

Caution number 2…. I do NOT recommend using a module to integrate your WordPress within Zen Cart. Fact is you lose a bunch of WordPress ability and worse the issues caused by the integrations.

I agree that you want your blog consistently branded to look like your shop’s pages, but the level of skill needed to create a good looking, branded WordPress theme is pretty low as far a templating software applications goes.

Here is an example we did recently for a Zen Cart owner to port his offsite blog content in to his own site http://www.horseprerace.com/blog/. Notice that while it’s a blog the navigation on both the store and blog are linked to each other and it’s consistently branded (styled).

Caution number 3…. Do not build a blog unless you have something useful to post. Things like articles about your products alone will not fit the bill. You have to create content that is useful and searchable. A great example is another customer we built a branded blog for, Silver and Pewter Gifts. This Valentine’s Day post is excellent, and EXACTLY the type of content you will need to attract readers, searches and backlinks!

Creating valuable and unique content for your website is a big commitment…. with big rewards. The most effective thing you can do it create 1-5 brand new pages with great content on your site weekly. Google especially respects the frequency of the content and rewards you in rank and crawl rate increase.

But how will you write all of that content? Well, to be honest… you don’t have to write it all.

You can hire a writer to create content on the topics you supply. Make sure to check their copy here so you know it is unique and not copied. Content that has been duplicated… just doesn’t rank well.

You can solicit guest bloggers… Employees, distributors, high school kids… you name it. Find people who are passionate about your website’s theme and let them express themselves. You will find that many more are interested than you think…. AND guest bloggers are a great way to help to promote your blog as well.

You can buy private label articles related to your content needs…. BUT these articles, unless unique will need to be rewritten to remove the duplicate content. However, they are excellent inspiration for the new writer and provide a nice framework for the post.

You can write great blog posts yourself. Just jump in. There are ton’s of great resources availiable to help you get started. Check some of these out:

• Writing great content http://www.problogger.net/how-to-write-great-blog-content/
• What makes great blog writing http://writetodone.com/2008/01/10/what-makes-great-blogwriting/
• One of my all time favorites… Writing great blog headlines/titles http://www.copyblogger.com/10-sure-fire-headline-formulas-that-work/

Some things I would like to add….

Blog with your own voice, words from you with your passion and emotion will be the most effective content and serve to build your readership as well.

Write your posts in 2 steps… If you are like me the ideas are just swimming around in my head and I can’t even type fast enough to get them all down. So when I finish fishing my head for ideas… I have to reorder, restructure and polish the gibberish I have pounded out on my keyboard. I am am really so bad that I will generally have 3 to 4 sloppy copies before I am done… My brain is much faster than my fingers. Read every post in preview view all the way through at least twice before you embarrass yourself by publishing poorly written or unprofessional content.

Lastly… NEVER leave a user comment unanswered. NEVER

Google Social Search

Impressed? Well you should be! Google has just supplied you the glue to bind and promote your entire social media campaign! In October 2009 Google released the new Google Social search for the purpose of experimentation. The experiment, deemed successful as many jumped in and tried it out, is now released in the Beta public format.

Cool, how do I get started?

If you have a Google profile already, just update it. If not get one!

Most of the information is general social media profile stuff…. But low and behold some great networking opportunities exist too.

1. The ability to supply a short Bio in html, including those precious links!
2. Custom links to your blogs and other promotable websites … and Your Google reader and YouTube profile as well.
3. Contact Info
4. Last but certainly not least…. a Cool Vanity URL with your username to link to. Here is mine http://www.google.com/profiles/MPrough

Missing?

Well there are a few things we like to see in a social media platform that are missing… Well maybe not implemented yet.

1. RSS feed opportunities … Well we can add a link, but…
2. Better image loading opportunities
3. More robust business related tools such as testimonials and recommendations

All in all, great way to give your social media campaign a nice boost…. In true Google fashion, for FREE!

Losers?

With the current climate of Google’s new algorithm, I have had cause to reflect on a basic idea…. Seemingly long forgotten. Are you getting the sales you need from your existing visits? Or are you a “build it and they will come” person?

If you plan to increase your traffic to meet your sales needs and never worry about what you could be missing… Stop reading, this will bore you =-) However, if you want to build your qualified traffic and get the sales from them you need, then read on.

Conversions! Yes folks SALES! This is the point right?

So in light of all the indexing and rank changes, we sent our SEO clients a “Biggest Losers List“. The concept here is that these visits are lost sales, for some reason. Price? Usability? Information? Something is missing and the page cannot make the sale.

First off, lets find your top 5 biggest losers for the last 30 days. Login in to your Google Analytics account, hopefully it is set up properly to track conversion data. Unless you have moved things around from your lower dashboard click “View report” on the “Traffic Sources Overview” box. Then under the sources area, choose Google Organic for example.

In the gray bar, there is a dropdown set initially for keyword, drop this down to landing page. Now click the header link in the “Visits” column to sort them by visits, more visits at the top. Now click on your ecommerce tab.

We are looking for the pages with many visits and no conversions. I have one of my own sites open right now to provide some examples.

Loser Page #1 had 52 visits and no conversions.

Loser Page #2 had 29 visits and no conversions.

Loser Page #3 had 20 visits and no conversions.

Now, we can clearly see without going a step further there is something wrong here. In this shop, for example, the “per visit value” in the upper bar is $4.86….. So we know that for some reason these losing pages lost at least $490.86 in potential sales….. OUCH!

Now lets gather some more information. In the dropdown next to “Landing Page” select “Keyword” to add the column. This complicates things a bit, but sometimes, Google needs more information from you to send your pages qualified leads. If you find that one of your losers is getting a bunch of seeming unrelated search traffic, then it is a good bet that the text on the page is not clear enough to Google.

A good example of this is our pet store example, the 29 searches are for “bows in bulk”… which we sell, except they are dog grooming bows. So I will be updating this page so Google can deliver it for more proper search queries. This part is easy….

What if these losing pages have good, relevant searches?

In this case, we have to have a good old fashioned, come to Jesus look at the page. Is the price too high? Information unclear? Terrible images? Missing selections? Or just plain poorly organized even. Trust me when I say, you must train your eyes to shop like a consumer. In reality it doesn’t matter what you think or what your competitors do…. Matters that there is a problem with this page you need to solve.

These things can really be very small… Layout, color, button positions etc. So your best course of action is to have some friends look at it. The trick here is two fold. First, whatever you think about what they say doesn’t matter… You are not an average consumer. Listen to them, analyze what they have said and act on it. Secondly, don’t go changing a hundred things on the page…. Nothing you cannot measure can ever be successful. Take your list, make a few logical changes and watch it for 3 weeks…. Then measure your results and continue to implement the needed changes in small doses as well. Pretty soon this page will not be a loser anymore!

Need a hand? If you post your page link in a comment, with your own thoughts and the visits & conversions… I will be glad to have a look and make suggestions as I can =-)

Ok, so that’s a funny headline…. But it’s true. We have had several cases recently where a Zen Cart owner or other personnel with access infected their own site with a Trojan.

JS-Downloader-X

The issue kept reoccurring after users cleaned their websites up. When cleaning a hacked website we look for back doors which can provide future access to cause damage. In this case, the “back door” providing the access for reinfection resided on the website owners computers.

The infection, caused by a Trojan downloader threat JS-Downloader-X, infected from several different websites. The threat is listed as high, and unfortunately at the time it escaped many common virus software scanners. The virus essentially uses the hosting and/or FTP login info on the user’s computer to make its access. This is highly hard to track down and prevent, as normal hosting firewalls, security rules and even brute force detection are not triggered… You see the access is authorized.

Below is a list of things you can do to keep your own computer and other who access your website clean.

1. Use the following online vulnerability scanner and ensure your software is up-to-date: http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/online/?task=load
2. Download anti-virus and fully scan your PC for malicious files. Here are some free online scanners for Windows, which is typically the most vulnerable to infection. If you have a different OS, there are similar programs that can be located and run on your system to protect it in the same way:
MalwareBytes ( http://www.malwarebytes.org/ ) and
ComboFix ( http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/combofix/how-to-use-combofix ) have been reported to be able to clean a recent strain of malware that resists detection by almost all other anti-virus agents. It is highly suggested that you one or both of them and one of the following:
-http://housecall.trendmicro.com/
-http://www.bitdefender.com/scan8/ie.html
-http://www.kaspersky.com/virusscanner
-http://support.f-secure.com/enu/home/ols.shtml
-http://www.eset.com
3. Update all passwords for any account that you access/own that may not be up to standards. Any passwords that have been compromised will need to be changed as well. Standards for secure passwords are available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_strength#Guidelines_for_strong_passwords
4. Keep your computer secure from malware infecting it. If your computer is compromised, your account can be compromised through your password being used to access it.
- Ensure you use the latest browser version; Ensure that said browser subscribes to Google’s blacklist API (Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari)
- Disable javascript
- Use the firefox addon noscript
- Make sure your antivirus has a subscription to new database and version releases. This may cost some amount of money, but is well worth the expense.
- Use http://www.avg.com.au/index.cfm?section=avg&action=onlinescan to test suspicious links you are given in emails or find online.
6. Ensure that all database configurations for your account are using a custom generated user and password combination, and that this information is not stored in plain text if this is feasible. Using your cPanel username and password to access your databases for your site may be convenient, but it introduces an incredible security risk.
7. Audit your account for unnecessary scripts, such as file uploaders. Ensure that if they are necessary that they are password protected, or if that is not feasible that they check the file type before allowing upload, to prevent upload of certain types of files.

Most important, if you see the file zcv.gif in your file structure, know that removing it will not remove the threat and all with access will need to properly scan and clean up their computers.

Brand Damaging

First let’s attempt to define what “brand damaging” actually means. It’s really a rather ambiguous, mostly legal term referring to statements, actions, images, content, theft and other actions causing damage or harm to one’s brand. Be that brand an authors name, a business or a service.

Many times this type of issue involves another nasty term, “identity theft”. The connection comes from associating a known brand, such as the case with Jeremy Schoemaker in 2008. This matter was one of the first notable cases I have seen reported. In this case,  the Hydra Network or one of its affiliates made unauthorized use of a picture of ShoeMoney holding a check and the accompanying ad claiming he had made the money using a scam called “Google Money Tree”.

How does this affect shop owners?

Many of you will have already received a letter of intent, or decided changes from your merchant bank if you process credit cards. The changes or proposed changes are quite frankly in answer to Visa Mastercard’s intent to take action in response to increases in consumer disputes related to card not present and direct response products and services.

It’s not really Greek, in a nutshell, if you, your practices, your security or your products and services are a bad risk, Visa Mastercard feels that this damages their brand.

These forthcoming and anticipated payment brand mandates and requirements will change a great many things for some merchants. For example e-online has already adapted the following policy changes:

e-onlinedata cannot accept merchant applications for products and/or services employing “Negative Option” enrollment, in addition to the following practices:

• Marketing models that employ “Free-Trial”, “Deferred Billing” and/or “Shipping Only”. Customers must be receiving a tangible good or contracted service in exchange for charging of payment cards. Incentivized discount offers are acceptable when the cardholder is receiving something in exchange for payment, however we will be unable to support accounts engaging in hidden or delayed charges and ‘free’ offers that are not truly free.
• “Cross-Selling” and “Up-selling” business practices. All sales should be directly between the business entities (merchant) processing the transaction and the cardholder, with cardholder authorization for all purchases.
• Per Payment Brand guidelines, the use of multiple merchant accounts, billing descriptors and merchant processors may be viewed as an attempt to avoid chargeback monitoring programs and is prohibited. Perceived non-compliance has led to termination of processing relationships. e-onlinedata will review the business consideration for opening multiple merchant accounts to ensure compliance with Payment Brand guidelines.
• Transactions generated from internet traffic and all other lead sources must be managed and monitored for potential fraud using an approved system. Third Party service engagement may be a requirement for account approval.

Of these, the most likely ecommerce merchant concern is the last. The last statement refers to properly managing, monitoring and PCI compliance of your shopping cart, hosting and merchant gateway. These are not recommendations, but rather already required for merchants. When you signed your merchant agreement, you also agreed to maintain the proper PCI/DSS standards and mandates.

Originally, PCI was Greek, however, merchants are learning and much support is available to meet the needs of small businesses whose budget for these matters can be quite small. Your merchant provider, merchant gateway provider or PCI approved scanner can help you to understand and manage the protocols necessary to keep not only yourself, but your shoppers safe. I have a post here to get you started on the road to PCI compliance.

It is clearly worth noting that the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) has already moved on the “Negative Option” marketing technique. Additionally, the FTC recently made changes to the requirements for paid testimonials, blog posts and endorsements. These are also clearly targeted at the web, and I think we can expect to see more of the same with big fines from the FTC in the future.

Not only are these things right and proper in my opinion, but changes to protect consumers on the web are long overdue. I think if you run and honest business in good faith you will not have any issues, frankly, those sapped by the movement to protect Internet consumers are in general those who would strive to deceive and take advantage of consumers…. Giving us all a bad name and damaging our brand as well!

Ecommerce Marketing

Internet use is still growing year after year, and as more and more people have Internet access, more and more small businesses are recognizing the importance of integrating some form of ecommerce / online catalog as part of their business marketing portfolio. The Internet never goes offline, and websites are accessible every hour of the day – there are no opening and closing times on the Internet serving a worldwide market.

For the average person, the ability to be able to shop from the comfort home is a very welcome idea, and is becoming a very popular method of purchasing goods… Even for mobile users! Those customers who still prefer the tangibility of a brick and mortar store, the Internet still provides a way of researching the products they are interested in, to compare different prices, gain product knowledge and prepare to make an educated decisions without salesman pressure.

Another advantage of the Internet is its worldwide reach. Small business retailers no longer have to have brick & mortar stores in many different geographical locations to become a national brand – by selling on the web, they can get their product seen by a much larger audience.

However, it is not as simple as setting up online and customers automatically come flocking to your shop; a lot of hard work needs to go into developing, promoting and securing your online store, thus tackling many of the same related start up and maintenance issues with a brick and mortar store. The biggest difference is cost, while you may end up paying a couple of thousand dollars to properly develop your shopping cart… you will still be saving on start up fees, rent and other traditional business overhead costs These savings can then be passed on to the shoppers, making your business more competitive in its niche.

Undoubtedly then, a small business with a Internet promotable product would be foolish to overlook the power of the ecommerce. Businesses should plan and look to incorporate some form of ecommerce into their current business marketing portfolio. Be aware, however, as major differences exist between selling online and selling in real life, and you will need to build up a high level of trust with Internet customers… In perhaps ways you are not yet accustomed to.

Ugh!

I guess one of the most disappointing things we deal with in our business is the “ugly” or “darkside” of how others deliver web services. There is not a single day that goes by where some website owner doesn’t contact us with issues related to the development, design or even ownership of their site. Everything from broken promises and deceit to outright performance issues send these customers hunting for a “new webmaster”.

We have dealt with some very disheartening issues for our clients. They call and need to move their site to proper hosting and can’t because they don’t have access, they find they do not own their domain registration, they have been locked out of and charged for GPL/free built in software functionality or their webmaster flew the coop.

While these issues do pain me, I have decided that all we can do is provide quality, honesty and transparency in our own business. So to that end, I am providing prospective new website owners the following list of tips and precautions before choosing a designer/developer and beginning a website project.

1. NEVER, EVER let a designer register your domain in his/her name. If this is how they insist on doing business, then find a professional.
2. Make sure you have full access to your hosting services, including support. If they want to host you in their account, then insist that you obtain your own hosting. If they refuse to play ball… find another.
3. Know what you want and need. Develop a list of the functions, look and services you need. Provide this list to several prospective developers and make them explain how these options are best accomplished. Those that cannot …. get dumped.
4. Know your software. If you choose a software driven site, such as Zen Cart, read and learn about the software. Buy a manual and really know what you are getting, then find a developer with a great deal of experience with your chosen software. This really matters, you see a general web designer cannot handle developing a Zen Cart project for example. They will only hack, crack and break the software functionality with their inexperience…. Costing you upgrade, development and repair money in the future.
5. Be ready to work…. This is your website right? There really isn’t any money for nothing going on here… That is a bullshit lie propagated by people who would seek to take advantage of you long term. If it sounds to good to be true, it is.
6. Do not rely on a sole person or company for the maintenance of your website…. People go missing all the time. Make sure you have a backup person and you are able to provide them the needed access (hosting logins, FTP and admin information) to help you in a pinch.
7. Remember when you hire a professional, they are the professional. If this person tells you something is a really bad idea, you should likely listen…. are you a web developer?
8. Insist on a development time frame and frequent updates. Development schedules get busted up all the time, but you need a plan and to be kept abreast of the setbacks and new expected schedule forecasts.
9. Check your developer out. Contact owners of some of the websites in their portfolio… Better yet, send links to each of the prospective developers of each others sites and ask for their opinion =-). Google the developer or company name looking for the good, bad and ugly comments you may find. Really check them out, this is alot of money to simply throw away.
10. Ask alot of questions! Every single thing you want, need to know, or do not understand needs to be asked…. This is your website and you need to know.

It’s also a good thing to user a designer/webmaster that has more than email access for support and questions, what if you are not at your computer and your site is down?

Being successful on the web takes a great deal of dedication and learning, all you do is in a constant state of change in this business. You never stop learning, adding new content and building links…. This is the cost of Internet success, make sure you are ready to pay it up.

I really enjoy writing here to help and empower shop owners. Nothing about this business is more disappointing than the helplessness that many feel with their new Zen Cart software. From the beginning my main goal has been to provide information and services designed to allow these small business owners the skills, tools and support to be successful and not so dependent.

So to that end I would like to share with you the top 10 posts that users have found the most helpful to them. May you find them helpful and continue to prosper in 2010!

1. Free Shopping Feed Marketing for Online Stores – This post is about marketing your products using shopping feeds and contains a frequently updated list of portals and venues which are free to submit your feed to.
2. Color Psychology for Ecommerce Design – Here is one of my favorite marketing subjects! The use and psychology behind web design. What emotions and actions do colors invoke and how can we use this to our advantage.
3. Zen Cart SEO – 12 Steps to Success – This post was written specifically with all of the Zen Cart forum posts I answer in mind. It is rather a discipline than a tutorial, a list of the things you need to do to successfully run your online store.
4. Ecommerce Checkout Suicide – This page contains both secure and nonsecure items. Do you want to display the nonsecure items? How to identify and fix the most common and dreadful cause of checkout abandonment!
5. 5 Easy Things to Make Zen Cart Cook – 5 easy modifications that will make your Zen Cart faster and perform better!
6. Yahoo Search Supports Google Base Formatting – How to use your Google Shopping/Base feed to submit your products to Yahoo Search Monkey enhanced shopping results… for free!
7. Beating Your Links Down? – Working hard on link building? Here is a comprehensive tutorial detailing the counter productive things you should avoid to make your links count the best!
8. In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries – How to identify, repair and prevent duplication content in your shop. There are in fact many different ways to end up with duplicate content… Here are some common ones we see in ecommerce.
9. Where is My Site? Google Sandbox Filter – The phenomenon that people have claimed to observe is that Google temporarily reduces the page rank of new domains, placing them into what is referred to as its “sandbox”, in an effort to counter the ways that search engine optimizers attempt to manipulate Google’s page ranking to bring sites to the top, by creating lots of inbound links to a new web site from other web sites that they own before creating that web site.
10. Shared Hosting & Bad Neighbors – Hosting is a very challenging subject for most shop owners. Sadly many attain less that acceptable hosting to run their businesses. This post covers the notable pitfalls of shared hosting from less than professional web hosts and the implications for your business.

There is one more post, this one actually finished 11th, but is a VERY common question and great information as well.

• Keywords in your URLs? Matt Says Yes – SEO urls, which is a misnomer for spam now is a pretty complicated subject that many shop owners do not understand and can be taken advantage of with. I also suggest you read this post, on our marketing blog regarding the weight given to keywords in different parts of your urls. Also, this post reveals what you may be missing by rewriting your urls =-(

For those that are interested here are some stats for PRO-Webs in 2009:

• 36 New Zen Cart stores were built
• 89 Zen Cart site reports were completed
• 37 SEO My Zen Cart packages completed
• 106 Zen Carts hosted
• 154,319 unique visits including 18,598 to this blog
• I have answered 1,802 posts on the Zen Cart forum and averaging 2.3 per day!

We enjoy what we do for shop owners and look forward to serving you in 2010!

Here’s wishing all of you a successful and prosperous new year!

Duplicate document detection in a web crawler system

Is your content unique?

12/1/2009 Google was granted a patent by the US Patent Office detailing how duplicate documents are detected in a web crawler system. This new patent details how Google detects and then filters or determines which documents are the “more important” version for the purpose of providing unique search results.

Most of the information we have had good reason to accept as true for some time, but detailing it in this manner can genuinely help webmasters to understand not only what duplicate content is, but how to create unique pages/content for searchers to find.

Duplicate documents are documents that have substantially identical content, and in some embodiments wholly identical content, but different document addresses.

The patent details 3 possible situations where duplicate content is detected and thus processed as such.

1. Two documents, including any combination of web pages (documents) and temporary (302) redirect pages, are duplicate if they share the same page content, but have different URLs.
2. Two temporarily redirected pages are duplicate if they share the same target or destination URL, but have different source URLs.
3. A regular web page/document and a temporary redirect page are duplicate if the URL of the web page is the target/destination URL of the temporary redirect page or the content of the regular web page is the same as that of the temporarily redirected page.

In some of these situations redirects are involved which are temporarily redirected pages such as a Meta refresh over 0 seconds, JavaScript redirects and 302 redirects. Permanently redirected pages are not associated in this manner for duplicate document detection because the web crawlers do not download the content of the redirecting page, only the target or destination page.

How does Google detect duplicate content?

Google simply compares the pages/documents to each other to determine duplicity. They can use a whole page or thumbprint so to speak, phrases and essentially any content the crawler can read. What was not clearly disclosed is the amount or percentage of duplicity which would then in fact cause a filtering action from Google with regard to the index.

Upon determining duplicity between to documents, Google then attempts to determine which document is most important. This decision is about importance, not PageRank, nor ownership. Once this decision has been made Google then proceeds to filter the duplicate page(s) from search results in order to provide searchers with unique and qualified search results.

There are many ways that shop owners create duplicate content. Many are easily managed and some are not. Doing everything in your power to prevent it is the best course of action, as there will inevitability be duplicity you cannot prevent.

Some of the most common ways that shop owners duplicate their content:

• Copying product descriptions from distributors or other indexed web pages
• Lack of unique page specific content enough to make a page unique within a common site template
• Posting articles or text from other websites
• Not properly redirecting the canonical url to the non canonical (www or non-www)
• Failing to add pages like the shopping cart page to the robots skip to prevent indexing
• Not using Google’s parameter handling to exclude or ignore sorted page urls
• Rewritten (SEO urls) which are not properly rewritten with a permanent or 301 redirect

If you think about it, Google is not trying to penalize anyone, but rather attempting to help searchers find fresh, unique and qualified results. Last time I checked this is the goal of a search engine =-)

Everyday I preach the benefits of using natural text within your site’s pages. Aside from the fact that most shop owners will inevitably spam if they dwell to deeply on keywords, it really works. I can give you tons of examples why, but we will cover just a few metrics today.

First and foremost, using natural text helps to grab customers more and high school report researchers less. For example, I was speaking with a customer today who sells engraved silver and pewter gifts. We were making a plan of attack for next year. The primary concern for this plan is to better target his Jefferson cups. While he is on page one for Jefferson cups, he is number 10.

So if you search Google for Jefferson cups, you will see that these very historical cups have many informational pages indexed and presented for this query. My point is, that the search rank for Jefferson cups matters little as these are not shoppers…. So if I was looking to buy one of these I would and most other searchers would use longer and more targeted queries.

• Buy Jefferson Cup
• Engraved Jefferson Cup
• Jefferson cups for gifts
• Pewter Jefferson cup

These are just a few examples of how one may search when the target is a purchase and not just information searching.

These longtail searches are more easily converted and easily targeted by using the naturally related words associated with the products and services in the product’s page copy. Not spam, just high usability and proper search-ability.

Traffic is traffic you may say…. But it doesn’t make it true. Fact is that ecommerce stores are designed to sell, therefore attracting customers is clearly the first order of business. Most information seekers will not be converted in to a sale… They just found the wrong site for the information they were seeking… Additionally, the likelihood that they will return someday to purchase because they remembered the site is store address is slim to none.

Why do you suppose users are searching with longer queries than say 5 years ago?

It’s really not that complicated. The many millions of unsuccessful searches have trained searchers to use longer queries to better target their search results. This isn’t the only thing searchers have been trained to do either. Another huge change is that searchers will read scan the text at the top of the page’s main content container for about 15 seconds upon arriving on a site. Not images… Not videos…. TEXT.

Searchers do this for a very clear and understandable reason… They are trying to very quickly determine if this page is relative to their search. Makes perfect sense… who wants to spend 10 minutes on a page that isn’t what we were searching for?

If I told you that less than 48% of all Google US searches were 2 words or less, would you believe me?

It’s true, fact is that the majority of Google searchers use 3 words or more in their query. In fact I would bet anyone that repeat searches are double and about 80% or better.

Longer Search Query User Data

Source: Experian Hitwise

The need for helpful, descriptive and natural text on your store’s page cannot be understated. Your shoppers need this text to help them find you, identify your page as a good result and better navigate your site.

Our November 2009 free site report winner is Purely Poultry. We welcome you to read their report below and visit their site as well. Please show some respect and do not create a bunch of test accounts and havoc on their website while poking around. We do welcome you to provide constructive criticism and suggestions for them to improve their store and business online.

Purely Poultry presents quite a unique online product, as a matter of fact this is one product line we have never worked with before. This fairly unique product line affords them an edge for rank, as the pool of fishes are few to compete with. Fixing some of the issues we found with the cart could clearly have very positive and fast results.

Below is a mildly edited copy of the Zen Cart site report we already provided to Purely Poultry. They have graciously agreed to allow us to publish this and share their issues. We thanks them for providing this medium to help other shop owners who may have similar issues and problems.

Load Speed Main Page: 237.53 seconds at 28.8kbs. We would like to see this well under 50, but the ideal standard is 30 seconds @ 28.8kbs.

On the main page only 5 HTML errors were noted, this is not bad at all… But repairing these will increase the ability for their site to be effectively crawled by the search engines and additionally increase the usability of the website.

Title: Main page title is 14 characters long and the suggested search engine friendly limit is 65. Your title is 100% relevant to your main page content, but lacks good information relevant to the page. This tag should contain a short (65 characters or less including spaces) description of what this site is about.

Current Title: Purely Poultry

Description: Main page description contains 113 characters and is 100% relevant to the main page content.

This description should contain text under 250 characters in natural language to prompt searchers to click through to your website. The Meta description is NOT used for the purpose of ranking your site’s pages, but rather as a means to elicit a click through from searchers. Note that your description is somewhat spammy as it is essentially a keyword list. Additionally, this tag should be a minimum of 100 characters for Google not to give a short description error in webmasters tools.

Current Description: Purely Poultry : – Pheasants Chickens Bantams Guinea Keets Books Turkey Poults Ducklings Goslings Quail Peafowl

Canonical Domain url Check:
Your site is returning a proper canonical 301 redirect from www to non-www or vice verse. Google currently has cached versions of both.

This means that sitewide canonical duplication exists as both the non-www and the www versions of the urls work. Duplication of this nature can cause many rank issues and even split PageRank between the 2 different canonical versions.

Google indicates that pages have been omitted from regular search results for being to similar or duplicate in nature.

Total indexed in Google.com: 624

Pages omitted from Google’s Main Index: 129

Pages within the Google’s regular search index: 495

*Your site has 718 pages indexed in Yahoo search.

*Your site has 15 indexed pages in MSN/Bing.

*You have 1 page indexed in Ask.com’s search index

Sitemap and Robots.txt:

A valid search engine sitemap.xml for your site was not found. This document, which is a specific sitemap for search engines, is designed to help search engine spiders locate and crawl your content better and therefore should NOT be styled for human visitors.

A valid, but miss-configured robots.txt for your site was found. A robots.txt is a search engine universal markup to prevent well behaved bots from crawling pages which have content of no value to the searchable index, are duplicate or blocked from indexing.

This has been partially corrected.

Backlinks: Your entire domain currently has 647 total back link(s) from domains other than your own.

This isn’t bad at all, keep up the good work!

PageRank: Your main page has a toolbar Page Rank 4 and there is no issue with your PageRank dispersion with regard to canonical duplication.

Sites on IP: Your site’s IP is 000.000.000 and there are a total of 8 domains hosted on that IP, none of which appear to be flagged as “bad neighbors” or hosting questionable content.

Spam and Hidden Text: Upon scanning your site hidden text was found, that appears to be related to your CSS menu across the top of your page.

Invisible text found. Method(s): CSS ‘display’ property set to ‘none’.
Invisibility purpose: Impossible to say.
Text: New Products

Miscellaneous:

• Your site appears to have what we call the “nofollow bug”. While this is a Zen Cart
  bug, a fix has been available for quite some time. Essentially every page on your
  site currently has a <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow” /> tag
  with in the head element that tells the search engines not to follow or index links
  found within that page.
• You should nofollow ancillary page links, or advertising links within your site
  (once the bug fix has been applied) to stop the flow of PageRank and prevent the
  crawlers from crawling these pages unnecessarily wasting precious crawl time.
• We would advise you to place a phone number in a prominent location through out
  your site. eg: in the header. To give troubled customers a sense of security, and a
  means of contacting some one should an issue arise. Without it shoppers tend to
  abandon the cart sales when they encounter any issues what so ever. They will not
  go looking for a contact number! Remember, not every search visitors lands on your
  main page, most land on interior pages.
• The use of mailto links or valid email addresses even in a textual format, like on
  your “Privacy Notice” page will promote spam, as these are crawled and read by
  spiders for the purpose of creating email list for sale to spammers.
• Your “Conditions of Use” is completely blank.
• On your privacy page under “How do we protect your information?” the last line
  of the second paragraph reads “and are required to�keep the information
  confidential.”
• You have unsecured elements on your secured SSL pages causing a broken lock.
  This is the number 1 cause of checkout abandonment.
• Your main page and category pages have very little textual content in order to rank
  with. You will find it very difficult to rank well in the major search engines with out
  it. Additionally pages like http://www.purelypoultry.com/bantams-c-155.html with
  very little text and an overwhelming amount of links lacking textual support may be
  viewed negatively by Google.
• It is a very large liability to have “Subscribe to Our Newsletter” checked by default
  on account creation, as shoppers will inadvertently get your newsletter and report
  you as spam. This is a FTC spam violation and has financial and business related
  liability in the US and many other countries.
• Your shopping cart pages still shows part of the default Zen Cart default text
  (defined in includes/languages/english/shopping_cart.php).
• Your “Checkout Success” page contains the following text “This file is located in
  /languages/english/html_includes/classic/
  NOTE: Always backup the files in /languages/english/html_includes/
  your_template”
• You would greatly benefit by reducing the steps involved in the checkout process.
• Removal of the side bars during the checkout process will reduce customer
  distraction as well as checkout abandonment. Once the customer has committed to
  the checkout process you should avoid giving them opportunities to click away.
• Your checkout pages are no secured. This is a PCI compliance violation and your
  company can be fined by the credit card companies.

I want to personally thank Purely Poultry for allowing us to audit and blog their site report results. I invite you all to comment any additional factors and suggestions to help them improve their Zen cart and business.

Zen Cart robots.txt

Is there a robots.txt with Zen Cart?

Do you have a default robots.txt?

The answer is no… But here is why.  Every cart is different, the very nature of Zen Cart’s flexibility prevents the ability to create a robots.txt that can be applied to even most carts. Things like easy pages and additional pages and installation paths make the process basically a custom procedure for each and every shop. The robots protocol isn’t really difficult, as a matter fact it’s quite logical once you get to know it a bit.

First, lets cover the basic function and ability of a robots.txt.

A robots.txt is a text document called robots.txt (exactly), which resides in the root of the domain. You can actually hide your robots.txt from basic Internet users by using a server side application such as Apache to deliver only qualified user agents access to the location and name of the robots directive on your site. This however, is really more work than necessary as password protect directories, such as login admin areas cannot be indexed unless there is a crawl able link to them somewhere.

robots.txt is an exclusion protocol for well behaved web spider or robots to access in order to receive directives regarding where they may and may not crawl your site’s pages. Blocking a page(s) from crawl in robots.txt WILL NOT prevent them from being indexed or referenced in the search engines results…. It only blocks them from being crawled.

I will cover the most common uses of robots.txt and their directives below for your Zen Cart.

First to cover is that there is NO Allow directive in robots.txt, this is in fact the default behavior… So only Disallow is valid. So if I have a page foo.html which I wish not to be crawled by any behaved crawlers, then the syntax will be as follows:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /foo.html

If I wish that a specific crawler, such as GoogleBot not crawl this page, then the syntax is as follows:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /foo.html

You can view a  list of crawlers in the robots database here. But for reference her are your most common ones.

• Google Search is Googlebot
• Ask.com is Teoma
• Bing is MSNBot
• Yahoo is Slurp

So we know how to block a single page from crawl, how about a page in a directory…  But not the whole directory.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder/foo.html

The index page within a directory only.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder/

All pages in the directory blocked from crawl.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder

All pages within a directory can also be accomplished with a wildcard. However, not all crawlers support wildcards. Google does, Yahoo does… Ask.com does not and although Bing claims to have partial support for wildcards…. They don’t. So we must first name a support crawler to apply the directive with a wildcard.

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /folder/*

The wildcard give us some greater control and ability with regard to robots.txt directives… Especially on our dynamically generated Zen Cart pages. The example below blocks a duplicate page from crawling in your Zen Cart shop.

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*&alpha_filter_id=*

This is to block a URI created by the alpha sorter in your product index pages. Essentially, every URL containing the parameter &alpha_filter_id= is blocked from crawl for Googlebot.

Lastly, the Universal Sitemap Protocol is supported by all major search engines and should be included. This is simply the correct way to let the search engines know where your search engine sitemap resides.

Sitemap: http://pro-webs.net/sitemap.xml

Against my better judgment I am going to post what some may consider a generic/default robots.txt for standard Zen Carts installed in to the root of your domain. I strongly suggest you read and learn to properly use the robots protocol and directives instead. I will take no responsibility for this, as it is a suggestion and you have been warned that every Zen Cart is different. Additionally, this WILL NOT work at all if you have rewritten your page’s urls.

# Robots.txt file for http://www.domain.com/

Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*&action=notify$
Disallow: /*&number_of_uploads=0&action=notify
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=discount_coupon
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=checkout_shipping
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=shippinginfo
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=privacy
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=conditions
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=contact_us
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=advanced_search
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=login
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=unsubscribe
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=shopping_cart
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=product_reviews_write&cPath=*
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=tell_a_friend&products_id=*
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=product_reviews_write&products_id=*
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=popup_shipping_estimator
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=account
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=password_forgotten
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=checkout_shipping_address
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=logoff
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=gv_faq
Disallow: /gv_faq.html?faq_item=*
Disallow: /*&sort=*
Disallow: /*alpha_filter_id=*
Disallow: /*&disp_order=*

User-agent: Slurp
Disallow: /*&action=notify$
Disallow: /*&number_of_uploads=0&action=notify
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=discount_coupon
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=checkout_shipping
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=shippinginfo
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=privacy
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=conditions
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=contact_us
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=advanced_search
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=login
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=unsubscribe
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=shopping_cart
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=product_reviews_write&cPath=*
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=tell_a_friend&products_id=*
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=product_reviews_write&products_id=*
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=popup_shipping_estimator
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=account
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=password_forgotten
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=checkout_shipping_address
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=logoff
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=gv_faq
Disallow: /gv_faq.html?faq_item=*
Disallow: /*&sort=*
Disallow: /*alpha_filter_id=*
Disallow: /*&disp_order=*

User-agent: *
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=faqs_new
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=discount_coupon
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=checkout_shipping
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=shippinginfo
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=privacy
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=conditions
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=contact_us
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=advanced_search
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=login
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=unsubscribe
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=shopping_cart
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=popup_shipping_estimator
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=account
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=password_forgotten
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=checkout_shipping_address
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=logoff
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=gv_faq
Disallow: /gv_faq.html?faq_item=1
Disallow: /gv_faq.html?faq_item=2
Disallow: /gv_faq.html?faq_item=3
Disallow: /gv_faq.html?faq_item=4
Disallow: /gv_faq.html?faq_item=5

Once again, every Zen Cart has other pages that should be blocked from crawl, and many have pages within these blocked pages that should be allowed. This is best used as a guide, once you have learned to use the Robots Exclusion Protocol correctly.

Google Caffeine

Google Caffeine is essentially Google’s new, upgraded search engine. While Google has said the official launch of the new search will not be made until after the holidays, it’s actually live in a few data centers already.

Google announced the new search platform development back in August of this year (2009) and has provided us a cool sandbox to test results in. While the sandbox is no longer available, we can tell you that for *most the ranking changes will be mild. I would like to, however, discuss the expected ranking metrics that will likely be changed or tweaked when the the Caffeine update goes live.

Back in August Google had the following to say regarding the needs of a quality search engine.

To build a great web search engine, you need to:

1. Crawl a large chunk of the web.
2. Index the resulting pages and compute how reputable those pages are.

Rank and return the most relevant pages for users’ queries as quickly as possible.

So what can you expect?

We think you can expect Google to really go after website quality metrics such as, speed, broken links, navigation and content. This will likely have a far greater impact on rank that in the past.

We also believe Google will add even more rank consideration to the signs of regularly maintained websites. We tell customers that Google likes to know the lights are on AND someone is home. The freshness and quality of content has been hugely important this year and we believe this will not only continue… But become even more important with Caffeine.

You can expect Google to continue to show strong distaste for paid and reciprocal links and can add linking out to bad neighborhood and spammy websites to boot. Certainly you have little or no control over who links to you, but you *should have complete control over who you link to. This is just another responsibility factor…. Many of the noted items that we feel are being weighted better center around professionalism, maintenance and effort. These are all things you should already be doing, this is your business… remember?

Spam. Google has consistently demonstrated that spam will not be tolerated. Things like hidden text, unnatural text, pumped up keyword density and comma separated lists are not going to be tolerated. We have already seen Google moving quickly and efficiently on these spam and quality issues over the last 4 months… Do not make this mistake, the cost can be more than your business can afford.

I think you can expect to see some very long time huge ranking factors fall away from the added weight they currently carry. Metrics like the age of the website will still be important, but not enough to maintain rank as they have been in the past. Those old, unmaintained authority type websites will begin to topple, making way for fresh and maintained content from any age website.

Shoot me now… But I think you will see Google taking a much deeper look at the type and quality of backlinks, as opposed to a number of backlinks or inventory type attitude. So links from Social media sources, which are considered highly fresh and indicate activity will carry more weight that they currently do. I think additionally, links from seed sites, which are ranking well and relevant will carry even more weight than ever before.

The way i see this, is that Google is doing its job and delivering the best search experience to their users they can. As a company they have consistently made advances and changes to better their products and services… I think you should understand, they expect the same from you. Remember, being ranked and indexed by Google is NOT your right… You have no rights, it is rather a privilege by contrast.