[danhak]

I'm experiencing this right now with my site https://www.dropspotter.com

I've done everything right according to Google, set up the search console, uploaded a site map, addressed all mobile usability issues. And yet only a tiny fraction of my content is being indexed.

I'm a bit at the end of my rope here as I've poured a year into this project and getting a historically normal amount of search traffic may be the difference between this project being viable or not. The most frustrating part here is having zero visibility into what's going on.

[soared]

Your site has very little “content” and is just product listings which looks like a million other garbage sites google sees. Great for ux to have the product listings users want, but the crawlers need some plain text to read to understand what you’re site is about.

I’d add a paragraph, hero image image, cta/etc at the very top explaining what your site is. Additionally you need a menu at the top and footer at the bottom with links to additional content-only (not products) pages - IE an about us, where do we source data, etc. Even 2 blog posts would help a ton. Do not stuff them with keywords but be sure to use the words that are common in your niche of the industry so your site gets associated with industry sites.

From googles eyes the difference between a scammy online ecom site and your site is hard to see! (Even if your site provides legitimate value to users).

You can try posting a link to it on various digital Marketing subreddits (not the like “rate my website” ones) to see if you can get more feedback - I haven’t done that in years though.

Edit - also didn’t realize clicking product links takes you to external sites. That’s a tough site for google to ever understand correctly since you have so little content and the best possible outcome of a user visiting your site is that they leave it. Maybe set it up to have each product link to your own page for it, maybe with price history from camelcamelcamel, links to the product in tiger sites, generic info about what site it’s listed on, or just crawl the description at the vendors site.

[danhak]

Thank you for this extremely helpful response

[vgeek]

From a UX perspective, your site is perfectly fine. From an SEO perspective, though, the brand/category pages don't have enough content (in Google's opinion) to be uniquely relevant. Even though a user would find the faceting/filtering functionality highly useful, Google uses things like word count, TF-IDF and topic relevancy as signals (albeit easily gamed) to surface "relevant" pages. This is why recipe sites all have 500+ word intros before each recipe and even more on category pages.

Backlinks also matter, for both domain and page authority. You are competing with 20+year old domains from large companies-- why should you (or any new site) get ranked before dickssportinggoods.com who have top tier backlinks (graph network, implies trustworthiness) from sites like Espn.com? Google likely uses CrUX data for ranking (because 2023 backlinking is vastly different than 2012), so high engagement from users is likely a KPI to focus on, in addition to backlinks (both branded and inclusive of terms/pages you want to rank for).

[hedora]

You make it sound really easy to build a search engine that would greatly outperform google:

Have its ranking algorithms do the opposite of all the things you just said!

[vgeek]

There are obviously hundreds of other factors (with different weights), with dozens/hundreds of tests at any given time, but those few factors are what have remained relatively consistent over time. That is partially why Google's results are so bad. It is only a matter of time for people to figure put what matters and then optimize against it. What is best for the user may not be the best for Google, sites or advertisers. Unfortunately, many times the best content isn't visible, because people capable of marketing have a leg up versus those who just want to provide utility.

[dahwolf]

I think the issue here is that whilst your site may have utility, it has zero original/unique content. To Google, this looks like a link farm.

You might argue that your discount price is "unique content" but good luck getting Google to understand that. Plus, I imagine those shoe names are competitive queries, which means you're up against paid ads. Further, I assume your discounts are time-sensitive, which means unreliable indexing is not a good solution for up-to-date pricing.