Are you prepared for more search engine changes?

Over the last two months there have been many changes to Google’s search algorithms. Are you prepared for these changes? Are you regularly updating the product content on your site?

To help you with the changes on the search engines — ShopFactory 9 introduced new product styles to meet the changing needs of selling on the Internet. A new standard, which uses 'microdata' to identify certain content in web pages, was adopted by Google, Bing, and Yahoo to better understand websites and the content on websites across the Internet.

Since January 2012, even before the search engines rolled out the actual algorithm updates, ShopFactory has had new product styles available to version 9 users. We also released a few new ones since then too.

The mark-up 'microdata' is included in the properties of the product styles for Titles, Manufacturer’s, Manufacturer’s Product Codes, Descriptions and a few other details that help the search engines understand your website.

These new product styles also include updated layouts with a cleaner fresher look.

• Larger stand-out product images
• Bigger 'Buy Now' and 'Add To Cart' Buttons
• Tabbed interface layout: Description / More details / Features tabs
• Grid style department page product displays

These are just a few of the enhancements available on several different versions of the new product styles.

The new layouts also work well with a feature we recently introduced call 'Dynamic Pricing'. When you have product options and different images for the options, the displayed image and pricing on your products is updated in real time when a visitor selects different options for your product.

A proven track record: ShopFactory new product styles with the 'Microdata' have been performing well on search engines

In last three months you may have also heard about Google Panda and Penguin updates. Many websites have been affected by these algorithm updates. Some websites have lost high rankings because of these changes. The ongoing algorithm updates have been affecting US online merchants on Google and will soon roll-out to other countries around the world.

But, did you know that many ShopFactory 9 users have seen an increase in their search engine ranking and traffic on product pages as a result?

During our testing and in viewing the results on some ShopFactory 9 user's live websites — we've tracked Google and Bing/Yahoo results which have shown increased rankings for those users. Aside from the product pages being ranked higher, department pages have also been affected positively.

This is partially because of the algorithm updates. And the new 'microdata' standards is the most important reason to use the new product styles found in ShopFactory 9.

You will need to review your products and the textual content you have on your products to fully benefit though.

If you are using version 9, ensure you have updated to the latest release as it includes the new product styles.

Click here to download the current update.

If you are using an older version of ShopFactory 8 or prior, we highly recommend you upgrade to ShopFactory 9 as soon as possible.

More changes and updates are on the way during the next few months on the Search engines and you’ll be prepared with ShopFactory 9!

Contact us for more details.