I can't understand how long time main category pages with PR2 or PR3, suddenly have NO PR at all? What the heck is going on?

Anyone else seeing this?

Another thing I can't understand is that, try as I may, our product pages, years later, are still not indexing.

I can't figure out how a fellow MC site can be found for a keyword that leads right to their product page, (and they are on page 1 of Google) yet our site for the same keyword is only found under the category listing which that product is in (on page 2 of Google)...

I've had this same problem for a couple of years now...I can't seem to get our products indexed and get a decent ranking, yet all of my descriptions are original and I try to optimize each product as it's listed. This competitor has alot less content in their description and is not doing alot of SEO on their page...so what could be happening? I'm starting to feel like, try as I may, I'm never gonna get ahead!!

MC staff...your opinions are welcome here too!! I'm open to anything at this point...

Hey heartland...I guess even best practices sometimes dont get the job done. I've been befuddled by this at times too.
You should PM scooter (he can explain). Great luck with this...would love to see input/opinion too. Would love to hear from papaschoppers on this one too!

I can't understand how long time main category pages with PR2 or PR3, suddenly have NO PR at all? What the heck is going on? Mine does this too but normally recovers in a couple of weeks. Also been reading rumors of G killing the PR feature.....


Another thing I can't understand is that, try as I may, our product pages, years later, are still not indexing. The only thing I can figure out on this is if xyz.com gets the product loaded first and a year later you load your product, then it is very hard to get indexed. I will PM you with some information on how to get these pages indexed.

I can't figure out how a fellow MC site can be found for a keyword that leads right to their product page, (and they are on page 1 of Google) yet our site for the same keyword is only found under the category listing which that product is in (on page 2 of Google)... Could be a couple of things here... age of site, timing of loading the product, how much different is your product description, internal linking of your website, etc.

I've had this same problem for a couple of years now...I can't seem to get our products indexed and get a decent ranking, yet all of my descriptions are original and I try to optimize each product as it's listed. This competitor has alot less content in their description and is not doing alot of SEO on their page...so what could be happening? I'm starting to feel like, try as I may, I'm never gonna get ahead!! Don't feel bad, my MC store is the only store I have that does not hold the top position when you type the store name in G. yet no one can tell me why......

I've researched my competitors, the ones who show up in top 10 results for my keywords and I'm amazed at how different their seo practices look from what we're told we're supposed to do. Some have over 50 meta keywords, repeating the same word 4-8 times, when we're told we shouldn't do it more than 3 times and should only have 10 or so keywords. The title tags will be 200 characters long, repeating keywords 4 or 5 times, one site didn't even have a meta description and they're in the top 5 for a bunch of keywords.

Obviously there's a lot more to it than just that, most of these sites have been around for years and years, some have thousands of back-links, and other stuff. I'm no html guru, but the source code looks really poorly done yet they still rank that high. I'm new so I'm not comparing myself to them, just trying to find patterns in the chaos.

I rarely hear anyone talking about Yahoo Web Rank, does anyone keep track of this?

There's the key. We have a very close competitor that is basically out of business except for a few like items, have a horrid site and do absolutely no SEO. Yet, because they ranked well when they were on top and have been around for many years, they still out place us on a couple of our key words. It's the longevity thing.

Of course one of the things I was wondering is if there are errors in my product code html that's causing the issue with the product listings...

But the category pages are another thing as well...

it's just a bit frustrating when you put lots of time, effort and energy into making the listing the way the SEO gurus say it should be, yet we still can't get the products to rank. *sigh*

Repeat after me ... I love search engines, I hate search engines, I love search engines, I hate search engines....