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For this weeks FreeTipFriday, our VP of Marketing and the master of Google is discussing the recent Google de-indexing bug and how it affected automotive websites
First off, what exactly is google indexing? well I imagine that most of you know what google is, the biggest search engine on the planet.
The web is like an ever-growing library with billions of books and no central filing system. Google uses software known as web crawlers to discover publicly available webpages. Crawlers look at webpages and follow links on those pages, much like you would if you were browsing content on the web. They go from link to link and bring data about those webpages back to Google’s servers.
So when shoppers are searching away, Google's servers have updated data to display the most appropriate website to the shopper.
However, on April 4th pages started dropping out of the Google index. Google on April 6th said they resolved the issue but then retracted the statement the following day, saying it was not fully resolved. It seems that it took Google a week to resolve the issue fully, however when we requested exact data we have yet to hear back.
So what does this mean for your business? Well think of your website as being out there in the ocean, and every night Google shines their magic flash light on it and grabs all the updated data from your website back onto their servers. However, for a week this magic flashlight was out of battery and Google couldn't update their database. Is it starting to make sense now?
So how do I know if my website was impacted, and if so how can I resolve it? It is imperative to update your website with relevant, accurate information that consumers in your industry would find useful regularly.
This way Google index bots always have a reason to scan your website for new information and update their database with the new info. Resulting in higher score card for you website, which means stronger SEO!
We included a lot of tidbit information in this FreeTipFriday, because we know how important it is that your online presence is stronger than ever. We want to make sure we do our part to share this information to help not just car dealerships out there, but all those who strive to have a stronger online presence.
Just another way for us to share our tools from DealersGear to help all those striving to provide better service to online consumers.
For more information, you can contact us at (949) 923-0190 or drop a line to support@dealersgear.com. Fill out the form below to subscribe to get the most up-to-date blogs and news right to your inbox.
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