Google Webmaster Tools and Shopsite

[extragear]

Google Webmaster Tools

Greetings:

I've included our website under our Google Webmaster account. (I did this some time ago) The site has been setup for some time and verified. I am curious if there are any Shopsite specific issues that would impact the results in the webmaster account.

For example,

1. We have 11 Not found pages. Most of these are pages we created and then deleted for one reason or another. They are no longer in the backend of Shopsite (meaning they are not in the pages section). So they've been deleted. I was wondering how long does it take for a deleted page to be removed from the Shopsite created sitemap?

Also, is there a tool that would show if a current page on our site still links to these deleted pages?

2. URLs restricted by robots.txt file. Google shows 34. Everyone of these appears to be a referencing of the shopping cart. Meaning, if I click on the link, it takes me to a empty shopping cart on our site.

So, is this normal? Is there a way to prevent Google from trying to index these pages? Does this even matter?

3. Web crawl HTTP errors. We only have two of these. They are both links to our media directory. The webmaster report indicates that these pages were either found in our sitemap or were found by following link from other pages. Is there a tool for determining which it is?

4. Within the Webmaster tools you set the geographic target. I am curious if anyone has used this or not. From what I read, it would depend on your target market whether you would benefit from this or not.

5. Also they allow you to set preferred domain. For example you can choose from either www.mysite.com or just mysite.com to have as appearing in the search results.

Looks to be more if a cosmetic thing than anything else.

Any input would be appreciate on these topics.

Thanks

[loren_d_c]

1) When you delete a ShopSite page, the Publish tab will pop up. Assuming you have the 'Generate Google Type SiteMap during update' checkbox checked in Utilities -> Publish, when you click on the Publish tab it will recreate the sitemap without the deleted page in it. Note that Google's site statistics aren't only based on what is in your sitemap file, they also periodically spider your site themselves.

Also, is there a tool that would show if a current page on our site still links to these deleted pages?

I'm sure there are plenty of tools out there that will do this. I've never used one, so I can't recommend one specifically.

2) Good. You don't want Google's spider following/indexing links into the shopping cart. It is a waste of bandwidth, and could potentially just add confusing links to your Google search results instead of your relevant store pages. That Google says these files are restricted by a robots.txt file means that some smart person (you, or your webmaster, or perhaps even your host) has placed a robots.txt file on your site with content that tells the web spiders (good ones, anyway) to not follow links to your shopping cart. Again, this is nothing to worry about, in fact it is good.

3) Probably the same tool you use to find old or broken links on your site would also find missing images on your pages for you as well.

4) The text on this screen in Google's Webmaster Tools says this: "If your site is aimed at users in a particular location, you can associate your site with a geographic target. We'll use this information to help us determine how your site appears in location-specific search results." So I think this would really only help if your site is also for a retail/brick-and-mortar business serving a certain city/area. It would only help in certain searches specific to that locale. For example, if someone searches for 'cajun restaurant in tampa' and your site happens to be for a cajun restaurant in Tampa, it would help you to tell Google this is where you are located (rather than hoping they will guess it based on some keywords on your site). However, if your business for this website is entirely online, it probably won't help you much to tell them where you are located because your business is likely not coming to you through locale-specific searches.

5) Yep, mostly cosmetic. Some folks like to use www, some like it without, some don't care as long as the shopper gets to their site.

-Loren