Okay, Zombies of the Information Society, as a website, is a failure.
My original goal was to capture some of the Ebay listing labor to produce a website.
- I’d upload to the site, and use the site images to load the Ebay images.
- This website would then create WooCommerce products, and link to the Ebay pages, and create click paths to sales.
- The premise was that, as the site grew, it would get more pages in the Google index, and climb up in search engine results, and become a second source of traffic.
I succeeded in the first goal, and created a small database that manages my inventory, and also uploads image files to the server, automated WooCommerce product creation, and also automated linking to Ebay pages. The software is rough, but it shaves a couple minutes off producing Ebay listings, and basically produces the website for free (more or less).
The second goal was also fulfilled. While the software wasn’t as good as I wanted, it was adequate, and for all its slowness – it was all doing batches of work, so it saved me a lot of time.
Micro gloat: The site now has nearly 900 products, and thousands of photos. The software helps to organize the product photo archives, which now have over 11,000 images over 18GB of file space. All the files have unique names, and most include a description of the image in the filename, along with sku, and original file name. This means the images are searchable from within WooCommerce’s media library.
The third part, Google indexing, was a failure, and the rest of this page is about the SEO failure.
There’s a prior report about this site, at Ecommerce SEO Fail(ure). (It’s a mess, and I’ll probably rewrite it.)
My SEO goal with all the automation was to:
- Make sure all the pages were linked correctly, had images, etc. So the page quality would be high.
- Use WooCommerce and other WordPress SEO features to avoid doing too much search console work.
I also had around 700 pages I’d written in the past, and moved it over to WooCommerce. Half are published on there, and generating a tiny amount of traffic. This is pretty depressing, because these were pages that, in the past, indexed successfully, and even generated some traffic.
I ended up doing a lot of Search Console work in the beginning to prime the pump.
The results? Terrible indexing:
It’s always been like this. Pages fall out of the index, and most pages don’t get into the index.
Early on, it was hard to get any pages indexed, because of page quality issues. Later, once I got the pages improved, more went into the index, but many were still not getting in.
I didn’t have the goal of collecting payments, but maybe if I added that, it would have helped legitimate the site.
I can put things into the index manually, but that’s a lot of work.
Here’s how often the site showed up in searches and how often it was clicked.
This is horrible. 200+ pages indexed, 800+ pages unindexed, and we peak around 60 impressions.
I don’t know what the peaks were. I did have periods when I’d try to push pages into the index, and also make changes to the title tags, so maybe that’s what happened. Other times, I imported articles into the queue, and maybe that altered the indexing and impressions.
I remember doing some precise searches for specific pages, and most of them wouldn’t come up in search results.
A huge problem is that Zombies is in direct competition with Amazon and Ebay, and the page title on the Ebay site might be identical to the page on Zombies, because the product and Ebay listing were the same text.
I suspect the competition between the Ebay listing and the Zombies page would end up with Zombies below Ebay, and thus, Zombies would lose the competition.
So, there you go. If you want to make a site that ranks, you can’t be competing against Amazon and against your own listings on Ebay.