Google deindexing Erol driven ecommerce sites

Follow-up post - see why e-commerce software sucks.

Erol is a shopping cart software invented by DreamTeam, a UK based Web design firm. One of its core features is the on-the-fly conversion of crawlable HTML pages to fancy JS driven pages. Looks great in a JavaScript-enabled browser, and ugly w/o client sided formatting.

Erol, offering not that cheap SEO services itself, claims that it is perfectly OK to show Googlebot a content page without gimmicks, whilst human users get redirected to another URL.

Erol victims suffer from deindexing of all Erol-driven pages, Google just keeps pages in the index which do not contain Erol's JS code. Considering how many online shops make use of Erol software in the UK, this massive traffic drop may have a visible impact on the gross national product ;) ... Ok, sorry, kidding with so many businesses at risk does not amuse the Queen.

Dear "SEO experts" at Erol, could you please read Google's quality guidelines:

· Don't [...] present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
· Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
· If a site doesn't meet our quality guidelines, it may be blocked from the index.

Google did your customers a favour by not banning their whole sites, probably because the standard Erol content presentation technique is (SEO-wise) just amateurish, not caused by deceitful intent. So please stop whining

We are currently still investigating the recent changes Google have made which have caused some drop-off in results for some EROL stores. It is as a result of the changes by Google, rather than a change we have made in the EROL code that some sites have dropped. We are investigating all possible reasons for the changes affecting some EROL stores and we will, of course, feedback any definitive answers and solutions as soon as possible.

and listen to your customers stating

Hey Erol Support
Maybe you should investigate doorway pages with sneaky redirects? I've heard that they might cause "issues" such as full bans.

Tell your victims customers the truth, they deserve it.

Telling your customers that Googlebot crawling their redirecting pages will soon result in reindexing those is plain false by the way. Just because the crawler fetches a questionable page that doesn't mean that the indexing process reinstates its accessibility for the query engine. Googlebot is just checking whether the sneaky JavaScript code was removed or not.

Go back to the whiteboard. See a professional SEO. Apply common sense. Develop a clean user interface pleasing human users and search engine robots as well. Without frames, sneaky respectively superfluous JavaScript redirects, and amateurish BS like that. In the meantime provide help and work arounds (for example a tutorial like "How to build an Erol shopping site without page loading messages which will result in search engine penalties"), otherwise you don't need the revamp because your customer base will shrink to zilch.

Update: It seems that there's a patch available. In Erol's support forum member Craig Bradshaw posts "Erols new patch and instructions clearly tell customers not to use the page loading messages as these are no longer used by the software.".


Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Erol eCommerce Shopping Carts e-commerce software Web development

Related links:
Matt Cutts August 19, 2005: "If you make lots of pages, don’t put JavaScript redirects on all of them ... of course we’re working on better algorithmic solutions as well. In fact, I’ll issue a small weather report: I would not recommend using sneaky JavaScript redirects. Your domains might get rained on in the near future."
Matt Cutts December 11, 2005: "A sneaky redirect is typically used to show one page to a search engine, but as soon as a user lands on the page, they get a JavaScript or other technique which redirects them to a completely different page."
Matt Cutts September 18, 2005: "If [...] you employ [...] things outside Google’s guidelines, and your site has taken a precipitous drop recently, you may have a spam penalty. A reinclusion request asks Google to remove any potential spam penalty. ... Are there [...] pages that do a JavaScript or some other redirect to a different page? ... Whatever you find that you think may have been against Google’s guidelines, correct or remove those pages. ... I’d recommend giving a short explanation of what happened from your perspective: what actions may have led to any penalties and any corrective action that you’ve taken to prevent any spam in the future."
Matt Cutts July 31, 2006: "I’m talking about JavaScript redirects used in a way to show users and search engines different content. You could also cloak and then use (meta refresh, 301/302) to be sneaky."
Matt Cutts December 27, 2006 and December 28, 2006: "We have written about sneaky redirects in our webmaster guidelines for years. The specific part is 'Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.' We make our webmaster guidelines available in over 10 different languages ... Ultimately, you are responsible for your own site. If a piece of shopping cart code put loads of white text on a white background, you are still responsible for your site. In fact, we've taken action on cases like that in the past. ... If for example I did a search [...] and saw a bunch of pages [...], and when I clicked on one, I immediately got whisked away to a completely different url, that would be setting off alarm bells ringing in my head. ... And personally, I’d be talking to the webshop that set that up (to see why on earth someone would put up pages like that) more than talking to the search engine."

Matt Cutts heads Google's Web spam team and has discussed these issues since the stone age at many places. Look at the dates above, penalties for cloaking / JS redirects are not a new thing. The answer to "It is as a result of the changes by Google, rather than a change we have made in the EROL code that some sites have dropped." (Erol statement) is: Just because you've got away so long that does not mean that JS redirects are fine with Google. The cause of the mess is not a recent change of code, it's the architecture by itself which is considered "cloaking / sneaky redirect" by Google. Google recently has improved its automated detection of client sided redirects, not its guidelines. Considering that both Erol created pages (the crawlable static page and the contents served by the URL invoked by the JS redirect) present similar contents, Google will have sympathy for all reinclusion requests, provided that the sites in question were made squeaky-clean before.

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