Google Base Is Trying To Kill My Business

katlupe · #1 10/03/09, 11:37 AM

My site has been in the top of all the search engines for years now, since 2002. Back then my site was only selling my husband's music and it came up under classic rock on the first page at the top. Then we changed to selling guitar strings and it has been in the top under our brand name of Curt Mangan. The last few days, about 3, I think, we have been eliminated from Google Base feeds because of...........these words in our title and description.....FREE SHIPPING. Can you believe that? They have a new rule, course they did not tell us, had to find it out for ourselves by seeing that our feed did not go up the last couple of nights.

So I go and check and other sites come up with Free Shipping in their titles and descriptions. I cannot think of a good reason for eliminating those words from a product if you are offering it. Many of the other sellers have a certain amount of money you have to spend to get the free shipping. I do not. I don't add extra money to the price of the product either.

One thing I have learned though is that our site has been very dependent on the search engines for customers to find us. Its like being dependent on the telephone company for my internet too which is something I have always hated. I guess I came here not really for advice as there is nothing to do except go through our listings and take out free shipping. Maybe it was silly to offer it anyway, and should just be like all the others and charge for shipping. And we have been doing really good lately and saw so much growth. Such a bummer.......

Thanks for listening.

katlupe

deaconjim · #2 10/03/09, 12:04 PM

Just use the words "Includes shipping", "The shipping is on us" or "We'll pay the freight"

hoggie · #3 10/03/09, 12:18 PM

Or how about "shipping $0.01"

byexample · #4 10/03/09, 02:05 PM

I recommend that you come up with a way to build a stronger relationship with your visitors / customers so that you, over time, become less dependent upon search engines for your sales.

The best way I know to do that is to develop and promote an email newsletter that includes a special deal only available via your newsletter. By regularly communicating with your customers you help remind them that you are still here and that your site is the place where they purchased their guitar strings from in the past.

When developing an online newsletter it's important that it not just be a big advertisement or overly commercialized. It must have some informational value to the reader... or folks won't read / subscribe.

Many of our clients (we own and operate a web development & marketing company) use this approach very successfully.

Being dependent upon search engines gets rough after a while. I've been building websites for a living for 15 years now and search engines have always been a moving target. One day you are on top of the world... next day you are on page 15. The big search engines are always refining their indexing algorithms and we see our rankings adjusting up and down on a regular basis.

Best of luck!

katlupe · #5 10/03/09, 04:20 PM

Thanks everyone for the ideas. We just redid the whole store of strings and are still working on it. Another thing they had changed was adding UPC codes to everything so we did that also. Whew! Lots of work we did. I did almost half and DH did more than half. I changed the wording in the listings and that seemed to go up okay. So for now it's fine.

Thank you byexample for the newsletter idea. Actually, we do have one and I write it myself so it is not a big advertisement by any means. I like doing it so it is something we send out a couple of times a month.

We have mostly repeat customers because once they purchase their guitar strings from us they usually come back. Our biggest problem has been fighting the scammers, email harvesters and some others.

We'll see how we do now. Hated to see us on page 2! Thanks again everyone!

katlupe