About to start my first Amazon AWS site... have done a bit of google searching and have yet to come across any good tutorials or best practices type of sites... anyone have some good resources they'd like to share? Or, any helpful tips would be appreciated ...
Wish I had some good advice for you, but if the site is solely an AWS site I am afraid you are out of luck as Google has pretty much killed these sites which weren't already in their index. Best advice would be to add it onto a content site and avoid doing a site that is soley AWS.
Hmmm. Interesting. I just started playing with the feeds and I can't figure out how any SE would be able to detect that this is an AWS site. They give you so much raw data and I can easily message it enough to avoid any duplicate content filter. Do you think they actually filter sites based on the existence of the add to cart and checkout links? If that is the case, I can still program around that by dumping into my own homegrown cart first then integrating with the Amazon cart as the last step before they leave my site, couldn't I? Know of any sites where the indexing/de-indexing of AWS sites is heavily discussed ?
Nitin, I can tell you PennyMaker comments are not true - so far for me and I have seen other new sited indexed. The best place that I like is here: http://www.mrrat.com/aws/index.html I am not a programmer and it was pretty easy for me. I think the key is to take the time to customize as you suggested to avoid any duplicate filter and keeping in theme is better than the general offering. Good luck
Here's mine in action: http://www.fengshuichinese.com/shop/books/list.php?Category=books&Keywords=feng shui Using Thinkbling's script.
What version of AWS are you using. The newest version has been renamed to ECS (E-Comerce Services) and is 4.0. Of course, my first suggestion is to use my script. I have a demo of the new one up at http://www.thinkbling.com/aws4 (This will be released in a couple of weeks). It took a while but Google has eventually cached over 6,000 of my pages. Do a "site:thinkbling.com" search and see for yourself. However, if you are going it alone, using my script or different similar one, make sure you integrate your store into an existing site. Also be sure to provide proper meta information and make sure that your description, keywords and title are different on each page. Don't be afraid to ask me any questions either.
Thanks everyone. TB - I have the latest 4.0. Right now I am still playing around trying to see what I can come up with in terms of sucking in, messaging and republishing the content I retrieve through the feeds. Well, unfortunately, I'm going with a brand new site. Why are people saying new amazon sites won't work? Is it because the theory is a new amazon site can't get indexed?
Are they actually saying old Amazon XML sites aren't working, as a recent look of my version (not updated for a while) looks a bit messed up. I guess I should upgrade when TB launches. Cheers
hey Mr Bling - will you release a UK version ? I am running seo-toys script on 3 sites - probably 15,000 pages indexed across all three - doubled my visitors - sales are up
Whoever said they don't get indexed is wrong. I have a site that is less than a month old with over 100,000 pages spidered by Google so far.
The 4.0 release will definitely support the UK and perhaps even Japan. All that will need to be done is to change the base XML reference to the UK source and remove the US only categories. This next release will also be a tad more HTML compliant.
Agree with Shawn on this one although less pages indexed. Brand new site and a tad over 500 pages indexed in the first week or two.
Ahh, I see I was misunderstood. My apologies. What I meant was that don't expect much traffic to come your way from the SE's if you weren't indexed pre-Sept Google update. Sure google will index the pages, because that is what Google does, but most anyone can tell you that the free traffic from Google has dropped about 80%-99% for AWS sites. My new ones don't even get touched. Who knows though, this trend may reverse itself.
With the AWS 4.0, you can always customize it to have the content be different. You could also display random comments and reviews to make your pages different. All in all however, if you have a good site that offers a good service, you will get indexed.