Who's Using Fresh Store Builder?

[icoslaw]

I will wait for a while heh

 

[shane8960]

Im having a long hard think about this today.
My first FSB site went from a position 1 wordpress site to position 44 and dropping daily.
I either hold my nerve and wait or call it a day, and ask for my refund.

Its starting to look like google has added the FSB footprint to the algorithm ??
Somebody prove me wrong?

Exact same thing that happened to me - if you notice the page thats ranking now wont be the homepage, but an internal page. even if I do the site:mydomain.co.uk search, the homepage comes up around 4th or 5th, behind internal pages.

Personally I would get a refund and would have done myself if I could but Im out of the 30 day period.

 

[shane8960]

I'm on page 1 of google with a poor content site. But I have the exact keyword domain and competition is weak so not sure what that tells you. Doubt i'll get bumped if competition is weak.

Is that using FSB? How long have you been on the front page for with FSB?

 

[Alien]

I think you chaps should wait a while longer and see what the long-term brings; although I appreciate and admit the gamble is there for any newly launched site or new (re)development, I can relate to your concerns too. It's a bit of a toss up, especially if you want to get a refund within the 30 day clause.

I don't know if Google has its claws into FSB and can only go from what I'm seeing with my own stores and those I've recently sold (some of which are doing well, others still gathering momentum, like any other site in existence).

I've personally got sites which are doing well, alongside those that are delivering not as well using FSB to be totally honest - but that's the same for any site, using any platform, backend, etc, etc. It's all about the same things for FSB as with anything - content, SEO, links, uniqueness, design/template, etc.

Perhaps Carey will pop on here and be able to give the lowdown on what could be happening with Google, if anything; it doesn't seem to be an issue with Bing, Yahoo, etc it seems? Google is still giving PR to FSB sites too.

Sites are ranking it seems though - actually one of mine went up using FSB. This was one of my earliest FSB installations and if you do a search for

you'll see the store currently in 3rd position on Google.co.uk page 1 (please don't post the terms on the forum, thanks).

I am thinking of conducting an experiment actually - with two almost identical UK domain names, same niche etc, one using FSB, one using a standard HTML template, both selling Amazon products (one with widgets, etc) to see what happens - both will have the same amount of unique content on each. Would appreciate ideas and insight on 'rules' for this from members to make sure it works.

 

[fresh79]

Exact same thing that happened to me - if you notice the page thats ranking now wont be the homepage, but an internal page. even if I do the site:mydomain.co.uk search, the homepage comes up around 4th or 5th, behind internal pages.

Personally I would get a refund and would have done myself if I could but Im out of the 30 day period.

Yes this is happening to me now, only an inner page is in serps & dropped another 21 places today, its not going to make any $$ where it is.
Carey - can you put our minds at rest and shed any light on this?

 

[belovedAunt]

I'm not much of an expert on xml sitemaps as I normally build Wordpress sites and the autogenerated sitemap.xml always works fine.

When i look at mysite.com/sitemap.xml for my FSB sites though, there's hardly anything there. And when i try using http://www.xmlsitemapgenerator.org - it can't seem to make sense of the site and it misses loads of pages out. (Yet if i try it on my Wordpress site it generates an almost identical xml sitemap to the Wordpress one).

FSB sites don't have a directory structure - i.e. all pages are just at the root level:

mysite.com/category
mysite.com/product1
mysite.com/product2
etc

whereas if you built a similar kind of site in Wordpress (which I have), you get a lot of control over the url structure so you can have something like:

mysite.com/category
mysite.com/category/product1
mysite.com/category/product2
etc

This helps the sitemap prioritise which pages are more important (i.e. closer to the root), and it also has added SEO benefits as the category is in the URL.

Is there anything in all this, or am I talking nonesense? it would be good to hear from someone who knows about xml sitemaps to see if the FSB sites are doing a good job in that regard.

 

[fresh79]

I'm not much of an expert on xml sitemaps as I normally build Wordpress sites and the autogenerated sitemap.xml always works fine.

When i look at mysite.com/sitemap.xml for my FSB sites though, there's hardly anything there. And when i try using http://www.xmlsitemapgenerator.org - it can't seem to make sense of the site and it misses loads of pages out. (Yet if i try it on my Wordpress site it generates an almost identical xml sitemap to the Wordpress one).

FSB sites don't have a directory structure - i.e. all pages are just at the root level:

mysite.com/category
mysite.com/product1
mysite.com/product2
etc

whereas if you built a similar kind of site in Wordpress (which I have), you get a lot of control over the url structure so you can have something like:

mysite.com/category
mysite.com/category/product1
mysite.com/category/product2
etc

This helps the sitemap prioritise which pages are more important (i.e. closer to the root), and it also has added SEO benefits as the category is in the URL.

Is there anything in all this, or am I talking nonesense? it would be good to hear from someone who knows about xml sitemaps to see if the FSB sites are doing a good job in that regard.

I dont think the url structure holds any weight for a sitemap, I may be wrong.
The priority should take care of that, how FSB does it: it generates 4x sitemaps,
sitemap.xml
sitemap_pages.xml = priority 0.4
sitemap_categories.xml = priority 0.6
sitemap_products_1.xml = priority 0.8

Again it would be cool if Carey could clarify this?

More worrying though; im getting lots of sitemap errors in WMT, not found, redirect loop errors & not followed errors? Anyone else getting this?

 

[icoslaw]

We should open new thread: "FSB PANIC"

 

[Alien]

We should open new thread: "FSB PANIC"

LOL. Don't worry, be happy.

 

[stender]

yes fsb site, robably been up 4-8weeks

 

[Alien]

Interesting info from FSB Blog:

Bounce Rates
I have explored in depth the Thin Affiliate Penalty issued by Google to some affiliate websites. In a nutshell – this is a permanent penalty that drops your site -50 places for every search term. I personally believe it is issued manually and my further research indicates that the bounce rate is a big factor.

This is my theory, which obviously can’t be proved but is my educated guess. Google knows how much traffic they are sending to your site and they also know how quickly people are returning from your site back to Google. If your site has a high bounce rate (70%+) it is flagged for a manual inspection. If this happens a Google employee quickly checks the site for a few key factors and then decides whether or not to apply the penalty.

I have found stores always have a lower bounce rate as the visitors are encouraged to visit other pages, see other products and typically they find a price they want and checkout. With a blog review site they are more likely to read it and click back without any incentive to continue.

Source

 

[shane8960]

Interesting info from FSB Blog:



Source

Doesnt fit with any of my experiences.

Sites haven't dropped 50, they've dropped pretty much totally (front page not listed in top 200 for EMD).

Isnt a permanent change - Ranks fine with wordpress, switched to FSB and it dropped, switched back and the rankings are back.

 

[belovedAunt]

I dont think the url structure holds any weight for a sitemap, I may be wrong.
The priority should take care of that, how FSB does it: it generates 4x sitemaps,
sitemap.xml
sitemap_pages.xml = priority 0.4
sitemap_categories.xml = priority 0.6
sitemap_products_1.xml = priority 0.8

Again it would be cool if Carey could clarify this?

Ahh OK - yeah that does seem to make sense now.

Thanks!

 

[icoslaw]

my 2 shops = RIP .... blehhhhhhhhhh

 

[bensd]

I had a feeling this was going to happen...

It appears anything too automated eventually gets the chop

 

[icoslaw]

its good that i got my money back from commissions in 2 weeks ...

 

[boxerdog]

Well if this is going tits-up then Im glad I still have most of my stores with SB, they rank well in Bing/Yahoo and you get a lot more commission, one sale through SB yesterday is more than I have made with FSB in total

 

[shane8960]

Does anybody have a custom theme they have made for FSB? I may try another site and just remove every foodprint I can find to see if it ranks. With that said, the robots file is set to block the /basket/ directory, but its been indexed for at least one of my sites (havent checked the others).

I've spoken with Carey, not had much input back - basically said that it cant be FSB as Google wouldnt punish a platform (I think my deindexed StoreBurst sites would disagree!).

My site which I've switched back to wordpress had EXACTLY the same content for each product on the homepage etc, the only difference is the platform (FSB vs Wordpress). I even adjusted all the t&C/privacy/etc pages so that they all had unique content. After switching it back to wordpress its back to its old rankings.

 

[Alien]

Does anybody have a custom theme they have made for FSB? I may try another site and just remove every foodprint I can find to see if it ranks. With that said, the robots file is set to block the /basket/ directory, but its been indexed for at least one of my sites (havent checked the others).

Yes, I've just completed a brand new custom theme that will be released for sale shortly.

If you'd like to see it on a live FSB site, please PM me for the private URL as I don't want this indexed in the thread.

Out of interest - are you chaps remembering to change all the default meta tags like in the titles and so on?

For instance if you don't, e.g on the homepage, you'll be left with <site title> Secure Online Shop or similar - I bet if you search Google you'll find quite a few FSB sites with the exact phrase "Secure Online Shop". Including one or two of mine I might add, lol, although they seem to be OK.

Just a thought...!

PS: I've found at least 20 so far with default titles...

 

[shane8960]

Yes, I've just completed a brand new custom theme that will be released for sale shortly.

If you'd like to see it on a live FSB site, please PM me for the private URL as I don't want this indexed in the thread.

Out of interest - are you chaps remembering to change all the default meta tags like in the titles and so on?

For instance if you don't, e.g on the homepage, you'll be left with <site title> Secure Online Shop or similar - I bet if you search Google you'll find quite a few FSB sites with the exact phrase "Secure Online Shop". Including one or two of mine I might add, lol, although they seem to be OK.

Just a thought...!

May be interested if it fixes the problem with sites being dropped. Will wait for someone else to try it first though.