Etsy vs Google...What went wrong?

If you've spent any time in the Etsy forums within the last week you will likely have noticed that there is a huge uproar amongst a sizeable segment of the seller community.  It seems that as of March 8 2010 many shops noticed a sudden and drastic drop in both sales and views.  At first many, including myself, attributed the drop to the regular ups and down of selling on Etsy. But then the forum posts started. Namely this one, started by peaseblossomstudios. Suddenly sellers were coming out of the woodwork with concerns about low views and stagnant sales. What was very concerning to many was that these weren't novice sellers, these were big time veteran Etsians with hundreds and even thousands of sales under their belts. People were listing and relisting and getting 1 or 2 views in 24 hours. Absolutely abnormal for sellers of this calibre. What is more, people couldn't find their shops or items on Google. Where sellers were once easily found on page 1 or 2 of Google search results, they were unable to be found anywhere on Google! Some sellers panicked and began a mass exodus, opening shops on Etsy's newest competitor Zibbet causing that site to crash under the influx of new traffic. As I write this, Zibbet is still inaccessible due to technical maintenance.
After several days of silence on the part of Etsy Admin they tossed us a bone and indicated that there may have been a problem caused by the third party tracking program, Dopple, that had been installed earlier in the year when Etsy co-founder Rob Kalin returned to Etsy. Dopple is his latest project and was part of the package deal of him returning to Etsy as CEO. Dopple is a program similar to Google Analytics in that it runs in the background of the site and tracks traffic and site usage. Ordinarily, this would be fine but it appears as though the program was improperly installed, or buggy, and this caused problems with Google. Google does not like third party programs that aren't installed properly and will penalize the site using them in search results. According to Indec, an engineer at Etsy the problem was with a bug in Dopple

      "We just made a code change to fully remove the Dopple Analytics code from the site.

                   We had the code "switched off", but a bug in that switch-off logic meant that Dopple was still being included on about 1% of requests for pages (at random across all pages and all users).


Thanks to the members who reported the problem - especially cindylouwho2 for a useful screenshot. It was a rather obscure and frustrating problem, and it took us rather longer to track it down that we'd have liked, for which we aologize. "
 
Why so many shops noticed the dramatic decline in traffic on the 8th of March is still a question that remains unanswered, as Etsy contends that the bug in Dopple shouldn't have interfered with Google search results, and insists that Google traffic to the site has remained steady. This statement is hard to reconcile with the data sellers are seeing in their personal Analytics. It remains to be seen whether or not there is more to this story.

How To Get Noticed By Google

There are several threads a week on the Etsy forums started by sellers wanting to know how to get Google to crawl their shops. When I started my shop on Etsy 2 months ago, I was on of those sellers. I had no clue about anything search engine related and was flying by the seat of my pants. Then I attended a Virtual Lab hosted by Etsy about Search Engine Optimization featuring Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEO.moz a consultancy firm used by Etsy. The whole conference was a series of "Ah-ha!" moments for me. I had never put much thought into how search engines work. They just did. Type in a search term and get a result, right? I really had no idea what happened behind the scenes or how to go about harnessing the power of Google to benefit my site.

I have learned that in a way Google is a popularity contest. The more people you have searching for you, the more "rank" you have with Google. Better still if you have popular, creditable sites hosting links to your site. This again increases your ranking with Google. Google also like sites that are easy to find and contain numerous keywords. A key word is a word that people will likely use to search for your site. So since I feature hand knits and crochet in my shop, it behooves me to use the words "hand knit" and "crochet" as much as possible. There is a fine line though, between keyword optimization and the point of sounding incoherent and spammy. You must be judicious in your use of keywords. It takes some experimenting to find the sweet spot, the amount of keywords needed to draw in customers without losing the cohesive feel of your text. This is why it is important to use your Shop Title and Shop Announcement, along with your Section titles. These are prime real estate for keywords, the first 160 characters are what Google is interested in. I have seen many struggling sellers that have low views are also the sellers that neglect to post meaningful content in their shop announcement.

Etsy recently unveiled a new tool for sellers. When listing or editing your items, you can now preview what the listing will look like on a Google search. This helps you to place your keywords and in exactly the right spot and you can know what customers see when you come up in a search. Again, it is the first 160 characters (letters) that Google is most interested in, so use them wisely!

You can also point Google in the right direction by manually uploading your URL to Google's data base. Go to www.Google.com/addurl and type in your site address. This is like adding your name to a phone book, Google won't guarantee that it will call on you, but at least it knows where you are.

Google Analytics is a free program that measures traffic on your site and gives you daily reports. Using this tool you can learn where your visitors are coming from, how many come from searches and what keywords are used to find you. There is also a map overlay that shows you how many hits come from different countries. Google Analytics will show you what your bounce rate is,that is how many people enter your site and "bounce" out in less than 30 seconds. A good bounce rate is anything below 60%. Your bounce rate is likely to improve if you frequently update your site with new content, causing visitors to stay longer to admire your work.

Frequent updates are vital for SEO. Google likes to offer fresh content to searchers so keep your site current. My site gets crawled roughly twice a week, and knowing when to expect a Google spider to crawl your site helps you know when to update your content for maximum exposure.

The above paragraphs outline what I have learned to be true about Google. I hope by reading this you are able to maximize your site's efficiency and get the exposure you want!