ProStores Tips and Tutorials – One Take Media

***UPDATE***

Found a way around this, just put in the root domain, i.e. www.perrysjewelry.com without the /servlet/StoreFront on it. That pretty much makes it a non issue.

***UPDATE***

Very recently Google made a change to their Webmaster Tools that will adversely affect a ProStores store that wants to add their site and get it
verified. They have started to automatically append a trailing ‘/’ slash to the urls entered into their ‘Add a site’ function.

Google Webmaster Tools is a great website dashboard that you can add your site to, it allows you access to reports, error tracking, site speed tracking, sitemap upload, SiteLinks, as well as the infamous “Help I’ve been banned from Google!” reinclusion request form.

There are two ways to verify your site in Webmaster Tools;

1. Add a ‘meta’ tag to the Header template above the ‘/head’ tag.
2. You can upload an html file to the root folder of your store.

Problem here is that typically you don’t have access to your root folder ‘/servlet/StoreFront’ so you are left with option #1.

This issue with Webmaster Tools directly affects ProStores sites because it changes the URL of the Store that it looks at to verify your meta tag. A ProStores site thats on standard hosting ends its URLs without a trailing slash.

Example: http://www.perrysjewelry.com/servlet/the-Women%27s-Jewelry/Categories if you add a trailing slash you kill the URL and the ProStores software generates a 404 error.

Example: http://www.perrysjewelry.com/servlet/the-Women%27s-Jewelry/Categories/. For whatever reason, probably CPU cycles, there isn’t any redirection done when you visit a ProStores URL that has a trailing slash. So instead of the site sending you to the page without the slash it dies and gives a 404.

This 404 error causes verification to fail and denying access to the best parts of Webmaster Tools.

This issue also directly interferes with a ProStores store’s ability to upload a sitemap to them because you can’t have access to Webmaster Tools at all until you are verified.

If you have already verified your site before this change went through then you should be ok.

If you are on a custom hosting solution, or running on a version of ProStores 8.0 or so you may not have this issue as you probably have a different URL scheme or have the ability to do some URL re-writing.

I have forwarded my thoughts and research to ProStores already and I hope to get Google’s attention as well. If you have a ProStores store, I would log into Webmaster Tools, click help, and fill out a help request on their user forums. Draw some attention to the issue and hopefully we can get a solution.

- Matt

Last Friday’s Whiteboard Friday from SEOmoz.com contained some really good information about why and how websites show up in search the way they do.

Take a few minutes to watch and listen, then apply what you’ve learned to your ProStores sites.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Domain Trust & Authority from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Getting Google Analytics installed will help massively with tracking some of these elements and help you to understand how to adjust your site accordingly.

Want help with installing Google Analytics in your ProStores Store? Check out our guide to Installing Google Analytics in ProStores. If you just want it installed for you we can do that too, visit our Products page to purchase our Google Analytics ProStores Install Package.

Enjoy the video!

Hey folks, next week, Tuesday, Ian Lurie of Portent Interactive and author of Conversation Marketing, a Internet Marketing Strategy blog will be hold a FREE Webinar. Ian is a good friend of mind and really knows what he is doing. You NEED to attend this!

Btw, I’m not making any money or anything like that, I’m just trying to inform all of you that read my blog and want to strengthen your businesses!

Sign up!

From ConversationMarketing.com
Transforming Google Analytics Into Business Analytics
When: 12 PM PST/3 PM EST
Where: Here, on the web, silly

The focus: Making actual, real-life use of Google Analytics to grow your business. No fancy shtuff like advanced segments. I’ll talk about:

* Data overload and how to avoid it
* The 3 factors you really need to track: Profit, Growth and Pipeline
* The system you need to make it work: Configure, Track, Apply
* How to use click value calculation to simplify it all.

I’ll also have Q&A at the end.

Sign up!

Good interview with Google’s Matt Cutts (head of web spam) by Web Pro News.

I’d strongly suggest you all watch it, its only 10 minutes long.