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Showing posts from 2006

CPR for a Yahoo Store on Google's Supplemental Index

Recently a client of mine came to me and said that most of his store pages disappeared from Google, and he did not do anything to make this happen. I was a bit skeptical, so I went to Google, did a search on his store, and sure enough, there were only two pages indexed, his home page and his site map (ind.html) page. The rest were in the supplemental results, which means that Google thought the rest of the pages were not much different than these two pages. When I looked at the supplemental results, the little excerpts under each link were exactly the same, and I also noticed that what Google showed under each result was actually text from the ALT tags of the header image. I looked at some of these pages in my client's store, and they were actually different. This was a bit puzzling, but then I thought perhaps Google saw that the header and left navigation was the same throughout the site (which is pretty normal), but that the text that made each page different was too far down ins

Replacing files in the "Files" area

Legacy stores have a "Files" button in the Yahoo! Store editor. This can be used to upload files to the store, things like pdf files, images, videos, whatever. It used to be that there was a separate "Files" library for the editor and for the published site - just like there is an editor version of your store and a published version. Well, apparently, there were some internal changes recently, and either this is not the case, or there is something with how Yahoo! Store resolves references to the file library. The issue: if you have a file (say, image.gif) in the file library, and your store has been published, back in the editor if you upload a new version of this existing file with the same name and try to reference it (as /lib/yourstoreid/image.gif, for example), you will see the old, published version, no matter how hard you try. The only solution at this point is to upload the new file and republish the site. After that, you'll see the new version. Obviously

Reserved page in Yahoo! Store

A client of mine asked me to figure out why her order status page - which contained only a simple HTML form - didn't work on her published site. It was a strange phenomenon, the page she created worked perfectly fine in the editor, but on the published site, all it showed was the word OK. This was really strange, as I couldn't see anything wrong with the HTML itself. Then, I thought, since the form used an outside service to return order status, maybe that service did something to the page. So I took the form out (leaving that order status page basically blank, with only the store header, navigation, and footer on it) and republished. Same thing! Only OK on the published site... Then I looked at the source of that page, and in the source there was nothing else except for OK. Now that was really strange, because in Yahoo! Store you cannot even create a page that does not at least have a regular web page layout like this: <html> <head> <title>No Name>/title&g

Live Support for your Yahoo! Store

You might have heard about LivePerson (www.liveperson.com) the leading provider of online chat that can be integrated into any web site (including any Yahoo Store.) With a service like that, you place a small piece of HTML code on your pages, and a "Live Help" image will appear on your pages. When a visitor has a question, they can simply click that image and initiate a chat with you (or one of your support personnel.) Or, you can initiate a chat from your end by inviting a visitor to chat. It is a great way to provide instant help and answer perhaps that last question that a potential customer might have. If you ever considered adding such a feature to your site (or if you haven't), I wanted to show you a similar tool I just found called Crafty Syntax Live Help . Crafty Syntax is a live help solution that allows you to offer live chat functionality to your visitors. And best of all, as opposed to other commercial chat packages, Crafty Syntax is free . That's right, i

Database Upload, Excel, and CSV

I've seen this come up many times, especially with people new to Yahoo! Store. They try to use the database upload function to load products into the store, and get a bunch of error messages after the upload complaining about missing fields, invalid characters, etc. The problem most likely is that they are trying to upload the actual Excel (XLS) file, not a CSV file. So before you try to upload your spreadsheet, first make a copy of it as a CSV file. This is one of the file type formats when you select File > Save As in Excel. Then, upload the CSV copy, not the original Excel file. Here is some more info on the database upload feature for Yahoo! Store .

Disable Right-Click

I periodically get requests from Y! Store merchants to disable right-clicking on their Yahoo! Store. They typipically want this so that their competitors cannot steal their photos. While disabling right-clicking is easy to do, it's not a very hot idea. Here are a few reasons why: It's does not give you 100% protection . Disabling right-clicking is a JavaScript solution, so the easiest way to circumvent it is to disable JavaScript while viewing the page. Disabling JavaScript is very easy to do. In Internet Explorer, you can go to Tools > Internet Options > Advanced, and disable "Active Scripting". In Firefox, you can download the Developer Tools extension , and you can disable JavaScript right off the toolbar (there may be other ways, I'm just used to using the Developer Tools extension for this.) Another way is to view source on the page, find the image location, then bring it up in your browser and save the image. Or, look inside your web browser cache. By