SEO issues with Magento

[t_parrish]

Hi Everyone,

We use Magento CMS for our site and we are having a frustrating time resolving our SEO issues. The site was very poorly managed in years past and in the past year I have redesigned and cleaned up many things. However we are recently having trouble with indexing and keyword ranking.

Issue #1:

Our main keyword ranking has dropped quite a bit while our other less important keywords have steadily risen. I suspect a very strict robots.txt implemented back in early January may have been the culprit. We have since been modifying it with out much luck. Many of our pages are still blocked.

12/05/12 : ranked 12th

1/09/13: ranked 19th

1/16/13: ranked 35th

Now: out of top 50 (52nd)

Issue #2:

Not a single image is being indexed. We are 0 for 582 according to Webmaster tools. Not sure why...

Any help and advice would be greatly appreciated as I have great determination and interest in learning the correct way to fix/do this.

Site: www.scojo.com

Thanks

[t_parrish]

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Daniel,

At first glance I'm not sure a robots.txt issue would be responsible for the rankings drop you describe. What pages are still blocked that you dont want blocked? Maybe something else is going on in regards the rankings?

For issue 2, have you submitted an image sitemap.xml? If so what is the address? I see plenty of your images in google image search, so some of them at least are being indexed.

[t_parrish]

Hi Lynn,

Thank you for the response. I personally don't think any of the pages I have blocked would really affect ranking but it was nearly immediate as soon as I uploaded the first one back in early January.

I don't believe I have ever submitted an image sitemap so I will be sure to do it.

I would really like to find a source for our ranking drop as it is driving me crazy. I fear I am missing something painfully obvious as I have looked at this site so much I may be over looking it.

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Daniel,

Maybe something else changed in the weeks prior to this that had an effect, like a template or layout change? Is it just you or have other sites fluctuated in the serps also? You have probably gone through this process, but worth mentioning since the robots.txt itself doesn't look very suspicious.

As for the image indexation, I think I have your culprit. In your existing sitemap http://www.scojo.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml there are 582 image urls and they seem to be all going to a 404 page.

Hope that helps!

[t_parrish]

Hi Lynn,

At the time the layout hadn't been changed a bit. Most all of our competitors have stayed put and we seem to be the only one effected.

I have checked the sitemap XML but don't see where they are all pointing to the 404 page. Can you direct me to how you found that.

Again, thank you for your help!

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Daniel,

For the images, if you download your sitemap here: http://www.scojo.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml and then search it for image:imageyou will find them. The first one for example lists this url: http://www.scojo.com/catalog/product/image/size/0x0/c/o/court_1133.jpg.jpg</image:image>

Which is a 404 (not pointing to a 404 page, just returning a 404 not found).

[t_parrish]

Thanks Lynn,

I see it now. I am not sure how to direct this to the actual image in Magento. I guess I have some investigating/research to do.

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Daniel,

Since I was looking I put the site through Screaming Frog (http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/) and there are a bunch of 404 errors being shown.

I think it must be the relative links you have in your footer. Weird thing is on chrome they work ok, but in firefox they return a page not found! Not sure if this is related in any way to your rankings drop, but even if just for user experience worth having a look and maybe even hard coding those footer links.

You can see an example if you go to http://www.scojo.com/mens-reading-glasses.html in firefox and then click on any of the left hand footer links to the other categories.

Good luck!

[t_parrish]

Wow, I just spent some time trying to figure the footer links out and it is just a mess! I don't understand what Magento is trying to do but it sure isn't working. Thank you for pointing that out.