Jul/092
Following on from Donogh‘s post on implementation best practices, here I explain in more depth some of the advantages behind an early go live.
Reasons for delays to a webstore go live can range from small issues with regards to customizations to the look and feel, to inadequate product data. While we emphasize that customers should have an aesthetically appealing site and should optimize the content, small issues that do not effect the functionality, or the look and feel on the whole, should not stop a site from going live.
The following reasons outline why it is better to go live as promptly as possible:
Search Engine Indexing: search engines robots index web sites in phases — in the first phase, only top-level pages are indexed. In the second phase, department pages are indexed, followed by category pages in next phase, etc. These phases can be as much as 4 weeks apart, meaning it can take anywhere from 3-6 months to get your webstore fully indexed. The sooner you go live, the sooner the indexing starts.
Return On Investment: getting a return on your investment is what it all boils down to. If your site remains in staging you will still be paying your monthly fees, but you will not be able to receive web orders. If you set the store live, you can continue to improve your product data and also accelerate the return on your investment through web orders.
Frequently Updated Site: it’s better to go live now with 100 items with high quality data than with 500 items in 3 months’ time. You can continue to add items to the webstore after go live. This plays to your advantage because search engines favor frequently-updated content, which means their spiders will return more frequently and your webstore will rank higher, sooner.
Obviously, we are not suggesting you set your store live right away, but once the store is at a point where it is ready, i.e., it has a payment gateway, shipping and tax configuration, high quality item data, and the look and feel match the company branding, etc., then why not set it live and starting reaping the rewards!
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10:04 pm on July 13th, 2009
Brian, I wasn’t aware of the indexing in phases. Would like to learn more about it, and you give me some links.
Also, is it advantageous during development to prevent all indexing with the robots.txt before going live?
10:05 am on July 14th, 2009
Phased indexing is a phenomenon we’ve observed ourselves from monitoring Google Webmaster Tools. Within a week of a webstore being set live, we automatically add the domain to the NitroSell account on Webmaster Tools and we also add the site map. XML site maps are generated on all of our webstores and are updated hourly with the synchronization process.
For instance, Hampton & Co’s site map is here: http://www.hamptonandco.com/sitemap.xml
That’s the standard URL at which indexing robots expect to find it, but we manually submit it to Google to expedite the indexing process; this is particularly effective for new sites, where they have no existing indexed URLs, but it also helps where the URL structure is changing for existing sites.
By continuously monitoring the indexed URLs on Webmaster Tools (or by using the site: operator on Google), you’ll see that Google starts by indexing the top-level pages initially, that is, the home page and the tabbed links. In the second phase, it typically adds only the department pages; then it adds category pages in its next phase; and it adds product pages in the ‘final’ phase. Although I don’t think Google calls them phases, that’s how it appears from the outside looking in!
Obviously, if you have a well-established site to begin with, or if you spend on time on (safe) link building after go live, such as requesting links from manufacturers’ sites, etc., the indexing should happen much more quickly. You can help the process by updating the site more frequently and, in doing so, ensuring you add as much new content as possible. A blog also helps in this endeavor. A good example can be seen on tottini’s site: http://tottini.com/blog/. They’ve actually extracted the header and footer parts of the template, applied that HTML to their blog and set Blogger to regularly upload the content via FTP — very effective!
On the subject of preventing indexing during staging, we already take care of that automatically — demostores and sites in staging always have a META ‘noindex, nofollow’ tag within their head tags (it’s part of the {ns:HtmlHeaders} call you’ll see in the NitroScript Header template). As soon as a store changes from staging to live mode, the META tag is removed to facilitate indexing on the new URL. This has the added benefit of ensuring that a retailer’s store and content does not become directly associated with the nitrosell.com domain.