SEO Issues and page open times

I've put my site out there and am ranking on page one of google for the site name and some keywords but not others. Could this also be something to do with the fact that individual listings seem to take far too long to open, google has been known to penalise site that are not very quick!

All help appreciated before I start to market the site heavily.

Roger.

 

I've been wrestling with this a bit too and found Google indexing the /cat links faster than the /listing links. I added all four of the sitemaps in my webmaster tools > optimization > sitemap i.e. listag-sitemap.xml , listcat, listing, and sitemap_index.

I asked theme authors if they would add the code that makes the reviews aligned with the "structured data" rich snippette code so that can also work towards SEO. I haven't heard anything back from them.

I have a separate dev coder that has done some custom coding for me on this theme and I may just add this work to his spec instead if nothing happens soon. Google's algorythm defibitely looks for this info http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2650907

And the more they push local they more important this will be.

 

I'm experiencing the same problems with slow load time. My site is so slow it's nearly unusable. This theme is not built for growth at all, so when you start to get many listings (I currently have 160), you need to do some heavy custom programming and restructuring of the site. For example, the site cannot handle more than one request at the same time, or else it crashes. The way the scripts, images, and css are structured, it's just a mess.

I am still glad I bought this theme, it just needs a bit more work to scale it.

 

So is the Geocraft Theme going to function well with larger sites? I've been working on editing my site for a little while, and this information is really concerning. I love the theme, but if it can't handle growth very well and begins to slow down when we start getting people posting listings, then this isn't going to work. I looked at a couple of your sites and saw how the other pages load pretty quick, but the listings are much slower. Why would that be, and is there a way to fix that? Or is it something like the way the listings are saved in the database just not done effectively and therefore we are always going to have this issue?

A little explanation as to what is going on here would be very much appreciated. Thanks.

 

Could we have a response from the Devs about this?
If Geocraft Theme can't handle more than one request at a time without crashing and becomes unusable with 160 listing then I'm wasting my time.
I plan to have around 200-500 at any one time. Before I invest anymore time in this could we have some information about fixes?
Thanks

 

Good thread. Feel free to check out my site for site speed: http://www.rebuildnewjersey.com/

I have 160+ listings on there right now. Currently my Google Page Speed rank is an abysmal 16 out of 100. That is virtually an unusable site. My developer has done a little work to the site, including compressing images, leveraging browser caching, combining like images into CSS sprites, minifying CSS, and deferring parsing of Javascript where possible. We also set up Cloudflare for the site.

Caveat: I have this site on a shared server at Dreamhost right now. Their server structure is far from ideal. This is no doubt contributing to some of the slowness of the site.

We are currently working on moving my site from a shared server to a VPS with a dedicated IP address or two. We are also massively restructuring the site to decrease the different files and scripts. Currently, every time a user clicks on a listing, 23 files have to load in order for that listing page to show! We are going to reduce this to 2 files - one javascript and one css.

Why are we re-structuring the site instead of just adding plug-ins like super cache? First, I already tried plug-ins and they didn't work. Second, there are already too many plug-ins that come with the theme. It's bloated enough and can't handle much more.

All in, my developer and I will be spending about 100 hours and about $4,000 on basically re-building this site. We are at 160 listings and heading for 500+ by year's end, so this is important to do now.

All this being said, I am still very glad I purchased this theme. It was a super-quick and easy way to get started and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to get their MVP (minimum viable product) out the door ASAP. However, if you plan to use this as a money-making site and really grow it, you'll need to do a lot of work.

I will keep this thread updated with our developments.

Has anyone else been doing work to the backend of their site like this?

 

Wow jhughes, that is some pretty amazing work.

First, with that work are you expecting the site to be able to smoothly handle as many listings as you can throw at it once you're all done?

Second, are the developers here involved or doing anything similar to integrate this kind of efficiency into the core theme?

 

jhughes, good luck!

I just visited your site and managed to make myself a coffee while your home page loaded.
However it scored 22 on google and ranked 74% slower than other sites on pingdom, which kind of backs this up.

My own Geo site which has 6 test listing and a couple of self added plug-ins (caching and xml site maps) scored 67 on google. This is already slower than my WP static site and blog which scores 87% on google.

Thanks for the heads up regarding Cloudflare, looks interesting.

Houston, we have a problem.
I certainly did not purchase this theme as a MVP. Whilst I don't mind and accept that a bit of tinkering maybe required, the notion that I now have to hire a Dev and throw 4k at it fills me we horror!

Inkthemes team, I think some sort of response is required.

 

Hello Roger,

Google has there own algorithms for indexing and ranking. As you say few of your listings are already getting good results, Some listings reach on top quicker than others. As your site grows google starts to index your pages more frequently which in turn leads to faster indexing. For new sites it might be slow initially but it gets faster with time. Also depending upon your listings quality (unique content) google starts to give more preference to your site with time. I do recommend you to install Yoast SEO plugin as well (tested with theme) through which you can add keywords and description for different listings for better indexing.

Thanks
Neeraj

 

Hello Roger,

We do have plans to include the Google Microdata but this data doesn't impacts SEO very much. It just adds few extra details to the existing indexed items in Google results.

Thanks
Neeraj

 

I tracked your site on Pingdom and the Performance Grade is pretty good: 88/100 for the theme homepage and 73/100 for listings page.

However the wait time of your server is pretty high almost about 2-3 seconds, when you compare that to our preview the wait time is about 950ms only with the same theme that you are using. The wait time has to do lot with the type of server you are using. I would recommend you to Install the default Twenty Eleven Theme and let me know the wait time using that theme on your server ?

GeoCraft is a App Theme which requires different JS files to function, combining them in one file manually would not be a better solution. You can use some JS/CSS Minify plugin to minify and combine your Javascript automatically, however it would not increase your speed considerably since your server wait time is quite high.

If you are planning a big site with 1000+ listings, go for better server that should solve your issues automatically. You can't expect best performance out of your existing basic shared hosting account. The Listings are implemented through Custom Post Type functionality which can support practically unlimited number of listings.

We have live tested this theme with thousands of listings data in it and it works quite well with that amount of listings data as well.

Thanks
Neeraj

See Attached Image:

 

Thanks for posting Neeraj I was beginning think that support was avoiding this.
So better hosting will be required. Oh well it is better to know this before investing too much time.

 

Thanks for the quick reply, Neeraj. You're absolutely correct (as I noted in my previous post) that my server is horrible. I'm on a shared server at Dreamhost right now and my site has been down several times over the past few days, so this weekend we are migrating it. Excited to see much improvement and will report back with the details.

Thanks for your input re: site structure, js, custom posts, etc. My dev and I will look that over again.

SEO - I am using Yoast SEO plugin with this theme and seeing awesome results in the SERPS, although I have to admit there is very low, and in some cases no, competition. Neeraj you're right - I am seeing exponentially better SERP results as the site grows.