I just wanted to find out if anyone has the same experience as me right now..
First of all, brilliant script, I couldn't be happier! I have submitted sitemaps to Google, and have seen a steady increase in indexing (about 30% of products). I also disallowed jump.php in robots.txt.
However, 2 weeks ago, Google dropped "products.php" from search results, replaced it with "reviews.php" (which unfortunately cost me traffic-wise as the meta-tag weren't as good!). So I tidied up "reviews.php", but the google cache still hasn't refreshed the tags. Then my database crashed.. it had been moved from a test server on a shared environment, to VPS which needed some tweaking. There was about 8 hours of downtime, but I rebuilt the database, and waited patiently.
It took a week, but the site started appearing again nicely, I've enjoyed a good week (products.php).
As of this morning, it's back to "reviews.php", and I really don't understand why.
Is it possible I am monitoring this too closely..? Please note this is *not* a new domain, and it's linked to a highly ranked content site which google refreshes almost daily. I also have some niche datafeeds in place, so a high ranking is expected in some cases. It's the google selection of "products.php" vs "reviews.php" that has me puzzled.
Any insight would be much appreciated!
Thanks
Hello
This is due to a simple thing : all product pages have their "copy" in terms of identical title & meta & product description
so it's likely that google considered these two sets of pages as duplicated, therefore it chose to pick one of them.
The solution consists in making review pages different :
-changing title & meta
-modifying as much as possible pages content itself
One possibility is that the review page is considered to be more "info" than "buy" page which it is rumoured that search engines might try to give priority to.
You can always block /reviews/ using robots.txt if you want to force selection of the product page instead - that might not be a bad idea in the cirumstances...
Cheers,
David.