I have no drops across five stores that I can see. My newest store, I mean brand new when I put it up, has 23K indexed pages. It's all book store. As for using the store for other items, I do not think the output for other items would be something usable. I'm thinking of doing a shop. I dunno, my plate is full, maybe I'll find the time. I don't want another cookie cutter shop. Something may inspire me though.
Nopidd lets make this an invite only thread because I have a nice idea. Set up the book stores with a google site map. Agreed a DVD store would be great, what about all the other kinds of stores, apparel etc...
There will be more amazon products to come. I have just not have settled on an idea yet. Anyone here using php5?
Tell me more, I have no clue. Can you suggest some pros and cons for each? I'm stuck in neutral for the way to go. Thanks
Well, in my opinion, a category (such as family, health, baby, etc) would be beneficial in terms of being more specific to sites. A site about exercise for example could pull from all products having to do with exercise instead of just all books available, etc. One con for that of course would be if the site could fit into several categories, or themes. Not that i have any idea about coding, but it may be possible to choose multiple categories as well. just my 2 cents
I can put in a vote of confidence for running the freeBS in SEO Mode. I've had three bookstores up for a while now running in normal .php url mode and Google refused to index more than around 50 pages from each one. I finally got mod_rewrite working on my web host and activated the SEO mode in each one. Two days later and I had 4000 notification emails waiting for me this morning telling me Google was crawling my bookstores, took around 40 minutes to download. I've now got one bookstore on a PR4 site with 3500 pages indexed Yay for freeBS and for noppid.
Thanks man. It's come along nicely. Glad to hear a comparison, but I'd have thought the php would do just as good. Go figure.
I'm sure I read somewhere on this site that Google has said that they restrict their crawling on sites with document.php?id=XXX type URL's. Of course I could be mistaken.
FreeBS rocks ! I actually sold a couple of books this month and I realized it was from FreeBS, I was only using it for links but I actually sold two books ! Thanks Noppid I think building an amazon shop by categories is the default method to extract and display the products by categories. There are hugh disadvantages doing it this way all stemming from everyone being forced to use the same category names Everyone has the same category - cookie cutter shops Same sequence of products Duplicate content Category numbers change - search query does not ! I think it is much harder to do a search spanning categories in Amazon - because I do not see it in any of the shops. And when i have tried to add this feature to a shop, I have failed miserably. I really would like to provide a digital camera shop that only sells 'Digital Nikon Cameras' that have a popularity of 4 or 5 and cost between 300 and 400 dollars instead of what I currently have , i.e . Category based... Doing this would allow me to SEO my pages to a smaller niche market like 'Nikon Digital Cameras' and a very specific audience who I can provide relevant content. With almost all the AWS shops I have tried (even paid ones) this kind of 'search' is not possible to the best of my knowlege and I think others here who have requested help on DP will also vouch for this problem. Another problem with the category route. Amazon also frequently displays 'price too low to display'. At times the first two pages of my camera shops all products with this silly message instead of a price. This forces the 'conversion ratio' to plummet and force people to click more than they need just to find the price or simply shope elsewhere where they can see the price. If FreeBS selects to display amazon categories then you can be sure your conversion ratio will also be low. The best thing would be for FreeBS to detect the 'too low...' and make another call to Amazon to find the price and then save it into a cache for display... OR the second best would be to filter the product out. I think if we work towards a search/query that we can SEO and fine tune then we can have shops different from all the other AWS shops on the planet. Thank you for your great code and generosity Noppid !
No. Googlebot manages quite well with URLs like that... though it's not crazy about session IDs and cookies... However, you may be hitting the Google "dynamic page" limit if it's a large store:
Hi Minstrel, Thats exactly the limit I was speaking of. Its stretching coincidence a little too far for me to think that 3 stores, separated in age by 4 weeks each all get heavily spidered within 48 hours of doing the mod_rewrite. Of course, it may just be that, coincidence. Mark
Thanks for taking the time to explain that. I can work with that info and most likely come up with a definitive anwser, one way or the other. There's more then one way to skin a cat! I still need to extract the phrases we use and internationalise them. I don't think there are too many though.
Thanks, Noppid. I really do not know why other AWS shop stick to category based only and do not provide advanced search and filter functions. I really think this feature would set FreeBS apart and we could build nitch sites. Thank you for taking time for this from your busy schedule I am curious to know how many on DP are using AWS from other countries. Perhaps an informal poll here would tell you if you want to focus your effort in that direction. I am guessing the most popular will be amazon.com, amazon.co.uk and amazon.ca and primarily english focused. Have a great day !
The reason there is not a freebs general store is cause that's exaclty what happens, it becomes a cookie cutter store. The phrases were asked for and I'll probably do it. I don't expect it to be a big deal. But you are probably rigth on the english.
{rubbing hands in anticipation of new FreeBS version} If there is gruntwork or testing you want me to do I will be happy to do it