Google and meta name="generator" content="ShopSite

[Keith Petty]

At the risk of making the people at ShopSite mad... here goes...

I believe the time has come where ShopSite should sit up and pay attention
to what they are doing wrong by not allowing more customization and or options
that can be set when building a site.

Especially when it comes to the <meta name="generator" content="ShopSite... tag
that they place in each and every page that comes from one of their templets.

I am sure that it is their advertising department that drives this decision
because if you view the source code of the shopsite back office...
it is not included there.

So why am I complaining? Simple... go to Google and search these terms:

meta name="generator" content="ShopSite
Your search - meta name="generator" content="ShopSite -
did not match any documents.

meta name="generator" content="text
about 118,000 matches

meta name="generator" content="Microsoft
about 62,600 matches

Why so little matches on the ones that do match? It is because the majority
of web sites on the internet do not place this tag in the head section at all.

The reasons are many but the fact is most do not use it and I believe that
search engines are using this information to penalize sites.

ShopSite had discovered, by chance or by design, the perfect combination
of page assembly, linking, <h*> tags etc. to help place our pages at the top
of most search engines results.

Believe me when I say that I am not just blowing off steam because of the
methodologies of the google search engine.

I believe Google also figured this out and is now penalizing any web site
which has a meta name="generator" content="ShopSite... in the head section.

I would love to hear from any other ShopSite user that took a heavy beating on
Google's search results to compare how many use ShopSite's built in templets
verses those that are still doing good with Google because they had the time
and budget to build custom templets so Google does not know that it is a
ShopSite store?

Yes I know I could spend a whole lot of time (time is money) building a
bunch of custom templets to override the ShopSite templets but the
ShopSite templets are part of what I paid for.

I know it would not have been that hard to simply drop the meta tag all
together because in older versions such as 4.x you could edit the templets
and easily rework them.

This is some of the code from one of the templets from shopsite 4.x that
I could change so that the "generator" meta tag did not even show up :
if ($PRODUCT_TYPE == $SSM_PRO) {
print
"\n<meta name=\"generator\" content=\"ShopSite Pro $VERSION\">";
} elsif ($PRODUCT_TYPE == $SSM_STD) {
print
"\n<meta name=\"generator\" content=\"ShopSite Manager $VERSION\">";
} elsif ($PRODUCT_TYPE == $SSM_LIT) {
print
"\n<meta name=\"generator\" content=\"ShopSite Lite $VERSION\">";
}

Since ShopSite decided to convert the templets to compiled code we can no
longer make any adjustments to their templets but are forced to build ones
of our own and that makes this product less valuable because we have to
write our own templets or pay someone to do it for us.

They want to keep their database proprietary and that is fine... but for the
love of pete... couldn't they at least give us the OPTION for this meta tag!

Ok... I've climbed off my soap box and am crawling back into my cave.

KP

[Nikolaus Gruchot]

Hi Keith,

?! We are using the build in templates only and there is no change in our
google rankings?!

The plus on shopsite pages is that they are static and therefore google (and
other bots) are grabbing the full content of our pages. We are listed 1-5
place (and 6-25 most often also) on almost all keywords that are important
for our buisiness. Guess its because we do have contents and are not to
general about our product descroptions...

Regards,

Niko
- Germany

"Keith Petty" <support@specialmart.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:ckua4q$ibr$1@eval.shopsite.com...

At the risk of making the people at ShopSite mad... here goes...

I believe the time has come where ShopSite should sit up and pay attention
to what they are doing wrong by not allowing more customization and or
options
that can be set when building a site.

Especially when it comes to the <meta name="generator"
content="ShopSite... tag that they place in each and every page that comes
from one of their templets.

I am sure that it is their advertising department that drives this
decision because if you view the source code of the shopsite back
office...
it is not included there.

So why am I complaining? Simple... go to Google and search these terms:
[...]

[Larry Bohen]

We (Audiobooks Online) have good-excellent Google positions for generic
keywords like audiobooks and audio books. A few years ago we had
good-excellent positions for specific audiobook titles that are searched
for, however, in general Amazon, which I believe uses dynamic pages, now has
much better positions for specific titles. It seems that Amazon has figured
out how to get high positions even with dynamic pages.

I would like ShopSite to give us the ability to have meta keywords and
descriptions for each of our 9000+ audiobook titles.
--
Larry Bohen
www.audiobooksonline.com

"Keith Petty" <support@specialmart.com> wrote in message
news:ckua4q$ibr$1@eval.shopsite.com...

At the risk of making the people at ShopSite mad... here goes...

I believe the time has come where ShopSite should sit up and pay attention
to what they are doing wrong by not allowing more customization and or
options
that can be set when building a site.

Especially when it comes to the <meta name="generator"
content="ShopSite... tag that they place in each and every page that comes
from one of their templets.

I am sure that it is their advertising department that drives this
decision because if you view the source code of the shopsite back
office...
it is not included there.

So why am I complaining? Simple... go to Google and search these terms:

meta name="generator" content="ShopSite
Your search - meta name="generator" content="ShopSite - did not match any
documents.
meta name="generator" content="text
about 118,000 matches

meta name="generator" content="Microsoft
about 62,600 matches

Why so little matches on the ones that do match? It is because the
majority
of web sites on the internet do not place this tag in the head section at
all.

The reasons are many but the fact is most do not use it and I believe that
search engines are using this information to penalize sites.

ShopSite had discovered, by chance or by design, the perfect combination
of page assembly, linking, <h*> tags etc. to help place our pages at the
top of most search engines results.

Believe me when I say that I am not just blowing off steam because of the
methodologies of the google search engine.

I believe Google also figured this out and is now penalizing any web site
which has a meta name="generator" content="ShopSite... in the head
section.

I would love to hear from any other ShopSite user that took a heavy
beating on Google's search results to compare how many use ShopSite's
built in templets verses those that are still doing good with Google
because they had the time and budget to build custom templets so Google
does not know that it is a ShopSite store?

Yes I know I could spend a whole lot of time (time is money) building a
bunch of custom templets to override the ShopSite templets but the
ShopSite templets are part of what I paid for.

I know it would not have been that hard to simply drop the meta tag all
together because in older versions such as 4.x you could edit the templets
and easily rework them.

This is some of the code from one of the templets from shopsite 4.x that I
could change so that the "generator" meta tag did not even show up :
if ($PRODUCT_TYPE == $SSM_PRO) {
print
"\n<meta name=\"generator\" content=\"ShopSite Pro $VERSION\">";
} elsif ($PRODUCT_TYPE == $SSM_STD) {
print
"\n<meta name=\"generator\" content=\"ShopSite Manager
$VERSION\">";
} elsif ($PRODUCT_TYPE == $SSM_LIT) {
print
"\n<meta name=\"generator\" content=\"ShopSite Lite
$VERSION\">";
}

Since ShopSite decided to convert the templets to compiled code we can no
longer make any adjustments to their templets but are forced to build ones
of our own and that makes this product less valuable because we have to
write our own templets or pay someone to do it for us.

They want to keep their database proprietary and that is fine... but for
the
love of pete... couldn't they at least give us the OPTION for this meta
tag!

Ok... I've climbed off my soap box and am crawling back into my cave.

KP

[Keith Petty]

What you are saying supports what I suspected.
You are using a custom templet and there is no mention of ShopSite in
the Meta tags.

I was kicking butt and taking names on google but not any more.

There are two sites I work with.
Products, descriptions, keywords and just about everything else on both
sites are the same.
One is built using Yahoo Stores and the other is built using ShopSite
and here is how they show up

MSN examples:
ladies purity rings - my work IS the FIRST THREE and # 7.
purity rings - #'s 3, 5 and 8.

Yahoo examples:
ladies purity rings - #'s 1, 2, 4 and 7.
purity rings - #'s 4, 7, and 10.

Google examples:
ladies purity rings - the Yahoo site # 3, the ShopSite is not even in
the first 100 if there at all!
purity rings - the Yahoo site # 12, the ShopSite is not even in the
first 200 if there at all!

The only real difference between these two sites is look and feel.

Still confused!

Nikolaus Gruchot wrote:

Hi Keith,

?! We are using the build in templates only and there is no change in our
google rankings?!

The plus on shopsite pages is that they are static and therefore google (and
other bots) are grabbing the full content of our pages. We are listed 1-5
place (and 6-25 most often also) on almost all keywords that are important
for our buisiness. Guess its because we do have contents and are not to
general about our product descroptions...

Regards,

Niko
- Germany

"Keith Petty" <support@specialmart.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:ckua4q$ibr$1@eval.shopsite.com...


At the risk of making the people at ShopSite mad... here goes...

I believe the time has come where ShopSite should sit up and pay attention
to what they are doing wrong by not allowing more customization and or
options
that can be set when building a site.

Especially when it comes to the <meta name="generator"
content="ShopSite... tag that they place in each and every page that comes
from one of their templets.

I am sure that it is their advertising department that drives this
decision because if you view the source code of the shopsite back
office...
it is not included there.

So why am I complaining? Simple... go to Google and search these terms:


[...]

[loren_d_c]

"You are using a custom templet and there is no mention of ShopSite in
the Meta tags"

That may be true of Niko's home page which is not ShopSite-generated,
but each of his 'Online Shop' category pages has the following:
<meta name="generator" content="ShopSite Pro 7.0.3 Default Page Template
-C code">

Here is a link to a google forum where someone also asked about the meta
generator tag:
http://www.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=& ... 26rnum%3D1

I think you are in the same boat as a lot of sites whose rankings have
dropped off Google recently. There are a lot of conspiracy theories out
there to take your pick from, I am sure you can find several if you
search their forum:
http://www.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=& ... rt.general

-Loren



Keith Petty wrote:

What you are saying supports what I suspected.
You are using a custom templet and there is no mention of ShopSite in
the Meta tags.

I was kicking butt and taking names on google but not any more.

There are two sites I work with.
Products, descriptions, keywords and just about everything else on both
sites are the same.
One is built using Yahoo Stores and the other is built using ShopSite
and here is how they show up

MSN examples:
ladies purity rings - my work IS the FIRST THREE and # 7.
purity rings - #'s 3, 5 and 8.

Yahoo examples:
ladies purity rings - #'s 1, 2, 4 and 7.
purity rings - #'s 4, 7, and 10.

Google examples:
ladies purity rings - the Yahoo site # 3, the ShopSite is not even in
the first 100 if there at all!
purity rings - the Yahoo site # 12, the ShopSite is not even in the
first 200 if there at all!

The only real difference between these two sites is look and feel.

Still confused!

Nikolaus Gruchot wrote:

Hi Keith,

?! We are using the build in templates only and there is no change in
our google rankings?!

The plus on shopsite pages is that they are static and therefore
google (and other bots) are grabbing the full content of our pages. We
are listed 1-5 place (and 6-25 most often also) on almost all keywords
that are important for our buisiness. Guess its because we do have
contents and are not to general about our product descroptions...

Regards,

Niko
- Germany

"Keith Petty" <support@specialmart.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:ckua4q$ibr$1@eval.shopsite.com...


At the risk of making the people at ShopSite mad... here goes...

I believe the time has come where ShopSite should sit up and pay
attention
to what they are doing wrong by not allowing more customization and
or options
that can be set when building a site.

Especially when it comes to the <meta name="generator"
content="ShopSite... tag that they place in each and every page that
comes from one of their templets.

I am sure that it is their advertising department that drives this
decision because if you view the source code of the shopsite back
office...
it is not included there.

So why am I complaining? Simple... go to Google and search these terms:


[...]

[Brandon Eley]

We use custom templates so don't have the "shopsite" in our meta tags
but I do use the generator tag and have never been penalized by Google
for using it. Well, I guess I COULD be but it would only be a few
positions since we pull up in the top 5 for almost every search term.

Search for any of the following in Google:

large shoes
large men's shoes
big shoes
large size shoes

2BigFeet.com should be right up at the top. Since we use the "generator"
tag does this disprove your theory? Is it just certain sites that are
penalized?

If there is a possibility that it could happen I'll remove them but I
haven't seen anything supporting it yet...

Best of luck,

-----------------------
Brandon Eley
EleyTech & RackData
brandon@eleytech.com
http://www.eleytech.com
T: [800] 682-2550
P: [706] 883-7078
C: [706] 668-0174

E-Commerce Resources - Articles, Community
http://www.ecommerce-resources.com

2BigFeet.com - Large Shoes for Men and Women
http://www.2bigfeet.com

Coffee News - Low-Cost High-Return Advertising
http://www.lagrangecoffeenews.com

Keith Petty wrote:

At the risk of making the people at ShopSite mad... here goes...

I believe the time has come where ShopSite should sit up and pay attention
to what they are doing wrong by not allowing more customization and or
options
that can be set when building a site.

Especially when it comes to the <meta name="generator"
content="ShopSite... tag that they place in each and every page that
comes from one of their templets.

I am sure that it is their advertising department that drives this
decision because if you view the source code of the shopsite back office...
it is not included there.

So why am I complaining? Simple... go to Google and search these terms:

meta name="generator" content="ShopSite
Your search - meta name="generator" content="ShopSite - did not match
any documents.
meta name="generator" content="text
about 118,000 matches

meta name="generator" content="Microsoft
about 62,600 matches

Why so little matches on the ones that do match? It is because the majority
of web sites on the internet do not place this tag in the head section
at all.

The reasons are many but the fact is most do not use it and I believe
that search engines are using this information to penalize sites.

ShopSite had discovered, by chance or by design, the perfect combination
of page assembly, linking, <h*> tags etc. to help place our pages at the
top of most search engines results.

Believe me when I say that I am not just blowing off steam because of
the methodologies of the google search engine.

I believe Google also figured this out and is now penalizing any web
site which has a meta name="generator" content="ShopSite... in the head
section.

I would love to hear from any other ShopSite user that took a heavy
beating on Google's search results to compare how many use ShopSite's
built in templets verses those that are still doing good with Google
because they had the time and budget to build custom templets so Google
does not know that it is a ShopSite store?

Yes I know I could spend a whole lot of time (time is money) building a
bunch of custom templets to override the ShopSite templets but the
ShopSite templets are part of what I paid for.

I know it would not have been that hard to simply drop the meta tag all
together because in older versions such as 4.x you could edit the templets
and easily rework them.

This is some of the code from one of the templets from shopsite 4.x that
I could change so that the "generator" meta tag did not even show up :
if ($PRODUCT_TYPE == $SSM_PRO) {
print
"\n<meta name=\"generator\" content=\"ShopSite Pro $VERSION\">";
} elsif ($PRODUCT_TYPE == $SSM_STD) {
print
"\n<meta name=\"generator\" content=\"ShopSite Manager
$VERSION\">";
} elsif ($PRODUCT_TYPE == $SSM_LIT) {
print
"\n<meta name=\"generator\" content=\"ShopSite Lite $VERSION\">";
}

Since ShopSite decided to convert the templets to compiled code we can
no longer make any adjustments to their templets but are forced to build
ones
of our own and that makes this product less valuable because we have to
write our own templets or pay someone to do it for us.

They want to keep their database proprietary and that is fine... but for
the
love of pete... couldn't they at least give us the OPTION for this meta
tag!

Ok... I've climbed off my soap box and am crawling back into my cave.

KP