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.

New SEO information for Etsy sellers from SEOmoz.org

Etsy has implemented several changes in the last few weeks for the benefit of its sellers. The new Search Engine Optimization(SEO) changes are going to be particularly helpful, especially with new sellers like myself struggling to get noticed. In the time it took me to read the PDF document I downloaded this morning I realized that there were several crucial changes I needed to make in my shop.

The article highlighted a technique I was previously unaware of called Keyword Researching. There are several applications online, such as Google's Adwords Keywords Estimator Tool, to help you find out which search terms, or keywords, are most likely to be searched on Google by using data from the last 12 months. This tool will be of inestimable value to newbie Etsians, I can't wait to try it out!

Another piece of information that I was unaware of was how exactly search engines find and rank a page. They search for the pages that have the most relevant keywords and rank them by how many keywords are on the page. Shop titles and shop announcements are prime targets for the search engines, so we need to try to squeeze in as many relevant words as possible, while maintaining the sense of the title and text and without sounding spammy. There are only so many times you can use the words "hand knit" for example, without losing the sense of what you are trying to convey. Wise use and placement of key search terms will make all the difference in how your customers find you.

I also didn't know that linking to your site via other sites increases your page's ranking in the search engine. The amount of influence your link gets depends on the source of the link. A link on a popular, well known site will carry more weight with the engines than a link from your best friends blog. You Etsy Mini is an excellent way to link traffic to your site from other sites, while also giving customers a foretaste of what you have to offer.

I offer my heartfelt thanks to SEOmoz and Etsy for giving us this information in such a user friendly manner. Way to go Etsy!