I recently ran across an interesting new newsletter offering Search Engine Optimization help for Miva Merchant users. Miva Merchant is an immensely popular E-Commerce product that adds product catalog and order basket support to a Web site. If your site uses Miva Merchant or you’re thinking about switching to the package, read carefully.
The default settings in Miva Merchant will likely get your pages de-listed by Google. Apparently, Google has long disliked pages generated by Miva Merchant. Therefore, it is not surprising that you’ll find few pages generated by Miva’s default settings in Google’s index.
A little known secret to getting listed in Google is to disable the Store_Code parameter in Miva merchant URLs to keep those pages from being ignored by Google. Specifically, if your URL contains “&Store_Code=” then Google will skip it when it indexes your site. If you have only one store, then disable the store feature in Miva Merchant to work-around the problem.
Of course, you will still want to be sure you do not break any other Google rules like creating mirrored sites, duplicate content, and so forth.
Check out this online resource to view more tips regarding optimizing Miva Merchant for the search engines.
About the Article
This article is copyrighted and has been reprinted with permission from FirstPlace Software, the makers of WebPosition Gold. FirstPlace Software helped define the SEO industry with the introduction of the first product to track your rankings on the major search engines and to help you improve those rankings. A free trial of WebPosition Gold is available from their Web site.
