GOOGLE AND MIVA MERCHANT

For a long time, the relationship between Google and Miva Merchant store pages has been somewhat like the relationship between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker.  Well, maybe not exactly, but close.  Google, in everyone's minds including ours, hated Miva Merchant generated pages for products and categories.  There were a few people on the merchant users list who would claim to have category and product pages indexed by Google.  Every time we checked, there were none.  Having pages dropped mysteriously is not uncommon, but they are usually picked up on its next crawl.  We have continued to check back for these sites but have never found any trace.  Despite this, we're here to tell you that it is possible!  Certain individuals, whether by accident or by keen insight, earned the love of Google by using links to categories and products that differ from the standard url.  Without knowing this, we thought of this same method late one night while pondering all that is Google.

Google was already quite willing to index Miva Merchant storefront, product list, customer login, search, and other screens that only contained one ampersand (i.e. & ). We theorized that of merchant.mv?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=storecode&Category_Code, the portion &Store_Code=storecode was the problem (more than one ampersand [&] to be precise).  If you only have one store, this portion of the url is not needed. We created some links on static pages, minus the offending store code, then placed these links on one of our client's static pages that is frequently crawled by Google.  We then patiently waited to see if our theory was correct.  What we found is that not only did it work for our client, but it had also worked for quite a few other people.  Maybe they were hiding the secret for themselves.  Here are some screen shots to verify that it is possible to have Merchant generated category pages listed in Google.  Click on the thumbnail to see a larger picture:

Currently, there are over 1000 category pages and over 1400 product pages from the Miva Merchant community indexed by Google. *EDITORS NOTE - Since our article on Google and Miva Merchant came out, the number of Miva Merchant category pages has gone from 1000 to over 8000, and the number of product pages has increased from 1400 to over 13,000 give or take a few hundred fatal error messages.  The numbers were originally much smaller, but we updated the numbers and forgot to document the original figures. Whether some of these people actually knew why they had these listings and were keeping it a secret is another question.  Getting your actual Miva Merchant category and product pages might make you think there is no need to have a program like Search Engine Killer or any of the other static catalog generators available here.  Think again!  Miva Merchant is not geared toward search engines.  You can optimize a static page and get much higher rankings most of the time than you can with a Merchant page.  The search engines also seem to eat up static pages while they only nibble in most cases when it comes to Merchant pages. 

Here is a comparison of how one of our clients received the number one ranking for the title of a children's book with a static page generated by SEK.  Guess who ranked below them?  Oddly enough, they did with the Miva Merchant version of this product.

It is important to remember that Google giveth and Google taketh away, and sometimes you just have to say, "Yes, Sir".  We will discuss how Google works, why listings may drop off, when Google will crawl again, pagerank, and much more in our next issue.  Find out how you can start getting your categories and products listed in Google with this month's Miva Merchant Help and Tips for Search Engine Optimization.

Don't Miss the Latest News and Tips on SEO / Marketing for Miva Merchant. Subscribe Now!

Attend the Official Miva Conference in San Diego and hear Jason live!

Miva, Miva Engine, Miva Empressa, Miva Mia, Miva Merchant, and the Miva Corp. Blade Logo are trademarks of Miva Corporation.