Life of an Online Business – My Pillow place

Two things of note…I’m so glad that tomorrow is the last day of May. This month can’t end soon enough. This is hands down the worst month of sales and traffic we’ve had since September of 2007. Sales have been absolutely brutal. There have been many days in a row without any sales. I’ve been putting coupon codes in to effect and have tried other things to help, but nothing is working. There is a 5% coupon code in effect right now, but no one has used it yet. This drought really needs to end.

The second bit of bad news this month is that Google is messing with my pages. My Google listed links have gone from 28 to 2 in a month. I don’t get that. Many of my pages in Google have gone from a 0 page rank (which is bad enough) to “this page is not ranked by Google.” Even this blog, which at one time had a page rank of 4, now sits with a “this page is not ranked by Google” label. WTF!

I’m just going to keep working and improving our site. I’m preparing to add a new category and new line of products. Young adult furniture…however, you can be any age. It will be smaller versions of some of our current products. I’ve been begging our vendor to create some smaller versions of products like the Cocoon Foam Chair because these products (as much as we think they are great) are very large.  If you have a small space like an apartment or a dorm, these products will not fit.  So, I will post when I get these products are available on our site…hopefully in the next day or two.  And from what I hear from my vendor, the prices are going to be very reasonable.  So this is good news all around.  Have a beer and celebrate!

I’ve come to realize that I wasn’t targeting the proper keywords in our dog bed section.  I also was able to see by doing a “site:www.my-pillow-place.com”  application in the Google search bar that I have some pages that have the wrong descriptions listed.  I’m not sure what caused this incorrect meta description, but I’ve tried to fix it.  I won’t know if it works until my pages get reindexed, which could be a few weeks from now.

I also noticed that one of my eco friendly dog pillow pages is not even ranked in Google.  So, I need to get it reindexed and hopefully, it gets a new rank…at the very minimum 0…Its odd for any pages on my site to not be ranked. I have 0 page rank on many pages, but having a page that is “not ranked by Google” is kind of vexing to me. What would a page that’s been around awhile, and linked from pages that are ranked showing up as not ranked?

I didn’t realize that it had been almost a month since my last post.  Where does the time go.  Well, last time, I intimated how bad April traditionally is.  And we’re about to set a new “low” record for sales this May, if things don’t turn around quick.  I feel like I’m on the cusp of real badness.  Everytime you hear the news, the unemployment rate is going up.  People without jobs don’t buy things they don’t need in lieu of the things the do need.

Aside from the economy, I’ve used this slow time to catch up on some fixes to our site.  I think we’re getting ready to add some new products to our site because 2 of our larger suppliers are offering us some new stuff.  Can’t wait.  I love to add new products.

I’ve complained in the past that Google has taken our page rank away and I’ve been trying to get it back.  I think I may have figured our why and I’m going to do some experiments to see if I can correct the situation.  I believe we may be penalized by a duplicate content filter that Google has in its algorithm.  On pages with little text on it, the text that does get counted towards the algorithm is the navigation text.  On top of that, some pages do have similar sections with some similar phrasing.  This is because I have a lot of products that are similar and the page format and information fits.  Usually only with some minor tweaks.

Well, Google doesn’t like duplicate content. I’m not sure what percentage of the text needs to be different before its considered duplicate, but I think some rewriting needs to be done.

I’m also looking at my title tags and meta decriptions.  These are two more things that need to be tweaked, I think.  I’ve got to have more focused keywords, especially for our large bean bag chairs section.  Other than that, our site is slowly chugging along.  I feel like we need a boost and I’m hoping it comes soon.