Hi everyone. Firstly, we want to apologise for not replying earlier and thank you for your patience. We didn’t want to respond until we had throughly investigated and could commit to fixing anything that came back as broken. This takes time and we acknowledge that it can be deeply frustrating to have to wait for an answer. However, please know that we do read the forums every day, so while we can’t always respond straightaway, we are always listening and do hear your concerns.
We have been researching the issues with SEO that you raised here and in the Clubhouse and have identified some problems. Overall, search clicks from Google is up 21% year-on-year from search results and 34% from image results, which is one of the reasons we hadn’t spotted that there had been a significant downturn in some specific (and important) search query terms. We are very grateful to you all for flagging these.
The good news is that there are things we can do to fix the issues we have identified and we’re now working on those. We’ll list those below to give you better insight into what’s been happening:
Despite improvements made to Search to help with SEO, it wasn’t being indexed by Google
It was not exposing search queries using sitemaps
Our Google Merchant Account (the ‘Shopping’ tab) had silently stopped working without informing us
Our Product Listing Adverts had not been picking up new items on Folksy (existing listings were still running)
Despite the overall improvement in clicks from search, some specific query terms had seen a big downturn. For example, we had 58,500 fewer impressions for the search term “Funny Christmas Cards” in the last 3 months than in the same period last year. However, this could also be due to user behaviour affecting the most used search terms.
Whereas for desktop over 90% of our pages are marked by Google as ‘good’, our page performance on mobile is suboptimal, which can affect ranking.
Here’s what we can and are doing to fix these issues and improve SEO:
Make search indexable (Done)
Make infinite scrolling work with crawler
Make category filters work with crawler
Expose search queries through sitemaps for the last 10,000 search terms
Get our shopping tab back up and running
Get all PLAs back up and running
Modernise the item page to bring speed rating into green
What we have learned:
We need a system or process to constantly check that all our SEO endeavours are working as intended
Even if our total search clicks and impressions are up, we need to spend time looking through the individual queries to make sure nothing has unexpectedly changed
Our community is awesome (although, we already knew this ) and we’re very grateful to you all for bringing this to our attention. As set out here, we’re also going to put a process in place so we don’t need to rely on you looking at specific search results to spot issues in the future.
Thanks for the comprehensive reply Camilla, great to know that you’re working on the issues and hopefully it won’t take too much time. It would be great if, when this sort of thing happens, we don’t get radio silence from your end - just a quick drop by comment saying “bear with us, we’re looking into it” sort of thing would have helped enormously I think, and certainly calmed some nerves!
Can I just ask, is work still going on to improve the search function? It’s so clunky and never gives the results you’re looking for properly - is this still a work in progress?
Hi Sarah. Yes I absolutely agree, we should have replied to let you know we were looking at it. It’s a yes to your other question too: we are indeed still reviewing Search and have identified some changes we would like to make.
Thats great to hear. I’m only just restarting my journey with Folksy and have just signed up to the ‘plus’ option. I would love to make this work and look forward to seeing it happen. At present I’ve hardly been seen, unless I join in the daily thread
Thanks for getting back to us. Just like to iriterate it would have been nice to have heard something from Folksy H.Q.
I have suspected a problem for some time. I am no good at I.T. However, i know 95% of my sales come from people searching on the web and i personally hate social media. I strongly suspected a fault in engine search links but didn’t have the technically knowledge to explain on the forum to members what I was trying to say. It wasn’t until a few regulars with more technical knowledge suddenly noticed a down turn in sales that perhaps the problem was connected to Google searches not working properly after all! I still don’t understand the technical bits, all I want is to going back to good regular sales again. There is still money being spent by the general public. Folksy could be a good contender giving Et-- a run for their money with the British public if they have the knowledge we exist. It’s also nice to know I’m not totally stupid and going mad in my old age and my deep belief in my suspension was correct and it is going to be resolved by you.
Thanks this is good to hear. I opened my shop last January and have found that my cards rarely come up in a general search on the site. I have suspected an issue for a while, but not being technically savvy, I didn’t know how to address this. Hopefully these changes will allow my cards to come up in searches.
This thread is so interesting. I joined at the start of Feb and sold a couple of my photos almost immediately but since then I’ve had no footfall for over three weeks. With the exception of the lovely makers on here who like each other’s work and get involved with the promotional threads, I seem to be shouting into a void. I really enjoy the group camaraderie on here compared to Et**, but if no one can find my shop, I’m just throwing money down the drain. I’m keeping everything crossed that the fixes mentioned above will make a difference.
Hey @OutOfCornwall I was just about to post an update on our progress actually.
Last week we successfully optimised our search page so it’s fully indexable by search engines, including the “show more results” button so search engines can discover lots of pages of content for every search link.
This means when you share search links such as mothers day on Folksy it’ll strengthen our search position. As always each search engines still decides which order to show pages in but having standalone pages for specific search terms will hopefully help a lot.
To kick-start this process we submitted over 10,000 folksy search links/terms to Google which added around 30k pages to the Google index.
This week we’re working on submitting a product feed to Google with all buyable items in it (it’ll be updated daily), which Google can then use to show relevant products when searching on the shopping tab (Google still decides which items are shown for every search)
It may sound positive but I cannot see any changes yet. Tried the search function today and it showed an error message, went onto Google and done a simple search and nothing Folksy after 6 pages-my page says I’m not using the correct browser but I use apple safari which is ok? pretty poor and I’m seriously thinking of leaving- sad.
) and we’re very grateful to you all for bringing this to our attention. As set out here, we’re also going to put a process in place so we don’t need to rely on you looking at specific search results to spot issues in the future.
