Hi Everyone,

I would like to thank everyone for all the help. I've learned alot reading the great forum posts here.

I've gone from a few hundred visitors a day down to 46 one day this week. Google has totally frustrated me, and I give up. I've tried redesign, keyword work, unique content, no sneaky tactics, and we've gone further and further in the hole since February.

I just can't take it anymore, and I give up. I am going to let the site flounder because I'm going crazy trying to keep up. It feels like I read and read and work and change things and nothing helps and its getting worse. We are doing awesome in MSN serps and very well in Yahoo serps, but google we're awful. And thats where all our visitors and sales "came from". So thank you so much for letting me vent and whine.

I love reading the forums here, and will continue to read because its fun and educational. But I give up !!

Good Luck to everyone with all your websites, and take care !!!

Thanks,
Linda

Don't give up Linda..... I know it's frustrating, hard work and down right annoying... but what business isn't?

It may not be any consolation but, even if you had a 'physical' business (i.e. a Shop) it would still be fraught with problems, hiccups and headaches.

Try to think of it a little bit more as a 'game' rather than anything else. Yes Andy is right and very wise with his words, but if you stop thinking of it as an uphill struggle, but a 'game' - then you might get a little bit of fun out of it, now matter what the outcome.

What am I rambling on about? Well, I here's what I do. I think of it like a game of chess. Google are the other serps and the opposition and all the pieces are my websites and / or customers.... (yep I may be crazy - you never know ). I play the game to win, but if I loose a few pieces here and there - so what.... the idea is to outmanoeuvre the opposition and get all my little pieces into the places I want them. The biggest difference in my 'game' is that the rules keep changing.. but that simple adds to the challenge

Go on.... give it a whirl. Don't let them beat you!

Hey Linda,

Stick in there, I only receive around 30 visitors a day but sales tick by.
I am the same as you and read and read until I am blue in the face. I am with Andy on this one, someone once said to me don't become obsessed with the search engines and try other things to get traffic.

Good advice.

Keep trucking and I wish you all the luck in the world

Thanks to AndyHenry, Eladesor and Ollie35,

I appreciate it !! Maybe I'll just take some time off, like a month or so, and drink some ice cold chillin in the freezer flavored vodka shots !! Yummy, my site will still stink but I won't give a hoot !!!

I've submitted to hundreds of directories, seen people link to the sites various information pages and google shows "2" Backlinks !!! Go figure, I guess they are weighing heavily on links now, and not so much content, figuring people will link to sites with good content. But..........since I changed my pages urls etc, all my page ranks except of few dropped from 3 and 4 to a big fat zero ! Who would link to a zero page rank page ?? I thought it would go up, I saw on various forums that their sites page rank went up to 3's or 4's and 5's. Mine of course didn't budge one ounce.

It's very hard to stay positive and not give up on a sinking ship, so maybe some self imposted time off might help, drink until I feel better, then start again.

Maybe instead of codes and look, and other stuff, I'll try to do more directories and some other form of linking.

As far as images goes, does anyone here know that if I submitted each image on the site in my google sitemap, might those images come back ????

Just wondering if that would help any ? See I'm supposed to be on a time out and I'm still blubbering on and on.

Thanks and have a nice week,
Linda

Originally posted by linder60@Aug 9 2006, 04:53 PM
I've gone from a few hundred visitors a day down to 46 one day this week

Me too. It happens. You get school holidays, bank holidays, sunny days, and there are times when people simply aren't looking for your products. Don't blame Google. I bet that, if you search for your top key words/phrases, your site still pops up in Google? So it's working.

You just have to "ride the waves". And remember that "the best customer is an existing customer" so, when business is quiet, send out your "special offers" mailshot, or simply a chatty email that mentions some recent additions.

BTW, try as I might, I can't see how to sign up for your mailshot.
http://www.cocomilkcollectibles.com/Newsletter.html
I looked at your links page, clicked on the appropriate link, and ended up on a page that apologises because you're buggering about with the site and directs me back to the home page! This is a good way to frustrate people. Make sure that all your links work all the time. Never delete a file - it might be registered with Google etc. If you want to make changes, leave the old page file and put a link to the new page on it.

And I can't find your downloadable eBook, brochure, catalogue etc. You seem to be ignoring all forms of "viral marketing" that will bring you more customers.

And your home page is a typical "roundabout". (See my previous posts on this topic).

Heck, even http://www.cocomilkcollectibles.com/sitemap.xml can't be found. I hope Google can find it.

Sorry, this comes over as a rather unsympathetic rant doesn't it.
I'm just frustrated because I see so many mistakes that will affect your sales. I really want the best for you!

Martin, Martin, Martin,

You've never been much for sympathy as far as I can tell LOL.

I'd love to ride this wave, but it's been almost a 7 month wave, and it's only getting worse.

Sorry but I'm not sure what a mailshot is ?? Not a term we here in Western New York State use. I think you are referring to the newsletter, I had that up for roughly 1 year and no one signed up, so I figured I'd dump the page, it was a page that I always had to update when I changed pages, and I figured since no one was using it, it was one less page to deal with when changes were made if I just removed it. (probably a stupid move).

Again, I'm confused with downloadable ebooks and catalogues, I don't have a clue how to do that, see I stink !

I've been trying to work on the roundabout thing, its still a work in progress.

Actually in searching our keyword items, in MSN were still top 3 in most cases, in Yahoo, first page in serps there, in google, hmmmm sometimes we just can't be found at all. Before February for virtually 95 percent of our items in the store, if you were to search google we would come up top 3 in serps on the first page, go figure. Now even our images are gone from google.

Our sitemap for google is there, google has verified it, and shows it as being alright. I just updated the mess out of it, oops I had put the initial html pages in it, but nothing else. (OKAY THAT WAS A HUGE MISTAKE) !!

I added, every product to the sitemap, every catalog page from the osc php portion of the site, and every html page.

The sitemap link for google sitemaps is here:
http://www.cocomilkcollectibles.com/sitemapspal.xml

I was thinking if I didn't post here, you'd miss me too !! LOL !!

I was going to do a farewell to Martin tribute post as well, with multiple spelling errors to delight you !

I mite not have the bestests of educating, but I kan spel like crazie !! And Martin, I no how agrivated you can get wen peepull do knot take the apropre-it time and affort to wright a nice cleen post !!

However, I just got side tracked some, I think the best thing for me is to take a break for a little while and maybe come back swinging, I just get so confused and frustrated, and I don't have all the knowledge that is sometimes required to get the job done correctly.

Thanks so much,
Linda

Linda, how long have you had this site up and running? It's taken me two years to get anywhere with Google. I seemed to do okay for a while and then it dropped off, and eventually it righted itself. I do pay for links though and looking at your PR it seems to me you don't have enough decent backlinks.

Looking at your homepage, the section about "How to shop" in my opinion belongs on a separate page about payment methods, etc. Personally I think you're wasting valuable space on the page which you could be using for more focussed keywords.

Also, you say you changed the urls of your pages. Are your old pages still coming up on searches? I know they won't lead anywhere but are they still on the search engines and can you create new pages using the old urls, this is assuming you are doing well for some of those dead urls? I hope this makes sense, it may not be possible if they were shop pages, I'm not sure how OS Commerce works.

I can't quite get my head round this roundabout thing (largely due to skim reading the forum lately) but I am assuming it is something to do with the lack of direction on your homepage, which I do think is a problem. I think your homepage is too busy and not focussed enough, the About us, Contact pages, etc. are not in the normal place you would expect them to be. You've got some great info on your site and I think you just need to help people find it. If this were my site I would start with redesigning your homepage, I'd get the non-keyword focussed text off that page where possible and just have obvious links to the info on separate pages, and concentrate on more keyword focussed text. I think you're doing the right thing taking a step back from it because you've obviously become frustrated. But what I would do is switch the computer off, put pen to paper, and plan your homepage better. Don't keep tweaking it, sit down and redesign the thing on paper and see if you come up with any better solutions. Just my two cents anyway.

Karen got it in one.

See http://traderonlineforum.com/index.php?sho...0&hl=roundabout

Thanks everyone,

I will be working on the roundabout issue soon, I plan on leaving the categories on the left and moving a few things to the right, and on the right side I'll be eliminating some of the boxes that are making the clutter effect. Customer bravos and the email us box, and the about us box. But I cant remove them until I make pages to replace them, then I'll place a link to the new pages.

On a mini hiatus, but will make changes when I'm not so stressed, then again, once I start on something I tend to work on it, so it may be sooner than later, or later than sooner, even I don't quite know yet.

Thanks so much,
Linda

Karen,

I see what both you and Martin and saying about the home page and will try working on that, once I have some type of plan in place.

The site has been around almost 2 yrs now, we were doing quite well in google, I guess thats the frustrating part, until February of this year we were fine, since then it has been getting worse by the month. Our products when searched used to come up top 3 most times in google serps, now for most of our items, we are gone or should I say so far down, no one would check that many pages deep into a search !

I've played around with some searches in different search engines, and got very frustrated with the results in google only.

Here is an example: 2004 Ford car brochure

AltaVista #4 on a short list
MSN #1 and #2
Yahoo #3
dogpile #11 and #17
AlltheWeb #5
Google - didnt see anything for our site and quit after PAGE 10

Another example: 1960 Chevrolet car brochure

AltaVista #4 and #5
MSN #7 and #8
Yahoo #4 and #5
Dogpile #21 and #26 and #27 and #35
AlltheWeb #4 and #5
Google - I quit looking after PAGE 12 !!!

See what I mean, I am very happy with how we show up on the other search engines, but we used to get most our visitors mainly from google.

Very frustrating, but seeing the results on the other search engines at least makes me feel like all my work, not the greatest work, but its still work and the best I can do, did alittle something good on some search engines. Oh well.

Plus like I stated earlier in this thread, even our images are now missing from google searches and they used to show up for all our items, now they've vanished for some reason, and people used to find us in images searches as well. We were doing close to 2000 visitors from just the images a month, so far this month and its now Aug 10, we've had 7 visitors for google image searches, OUCH !!

Thanks,
Linda