We are having issues with the SEO and Google web crawling for our website (operabracelets.com). When Google recently changed their SEO algorithms, we dropped from the first page of the search results to the 7thpage, which is killing our business!
After we researched the issue, we found that Google is only crawling 6 of our web pages and apparently not seeing all of the 30+ pages within the SmithCart catalog, which houses most of our content. The only way for those pages to come up in a search is to physically type in a phrase that is part of the page, which will almost never happen for someone searching. Also, none of the pictures in the catalog are coming up in searches.
We were wondering if the fact that the Catalog pages are secure (https) is now causing Google to not crawl the pages. If that is a possible reason for the huge drop in our search engine rankings, is there any way to have the catalog pages with the text and pictures be a non-secure page and only the checkout process be secure? Also, can alt-text be added to the pictures to make them more visible to Google?
If the entire catalog has to be secure, what would you recommend we do to make the information crawlable to Google? The only solution we can think of is to make 30+ “duplicate” pages that include these photos, text and keywords. This seems to be a lot of work that will confuse site visitors. Please advise thoughts on how we can deal with the situation in the most efficient way.
FYI, we are running SmithCart 2.88 and DNN V05.02.02. Thanks for your help!