You may or may not be aware of a piece of eCommerce software called DigiShop. It’s pretty much the solution we use here at AWP for our eCommerce clients. There are some nice benefits to DigiShop: you can fiddle with the PHP code to your heart’s content, you buy the software once, and it can integrate nicely enough with CakePHP. The company, SumEffect, is small enough that you can always reach someone on the phone, and if you do that enough, they remember you.

However, there are some issues with this piece of software that you need to watch out for.

Here at the shop, we just finished up this great new eCommerce site for a new business here in Ithaca, called Garden Gate Delivery. It’s a grocery-delivery service that provides only local food. It’s really awesome, actually, and besides the fact that we did the logo and website, we are genuinely excited about the business, and want it to flourish.

Imagine our shock, then, when a week after we launched the site, it disappeared from the Google Search results. Yep. What was once the top hit under “Garden Gate Ithaca” was nowhere to be found. Searching “Garden Gate Delivery” would list the actual website at the bottom of the 1st or 2nd page, depending on the user. The Google Local Business entry was gone. Luckily, Garden Gate’s entry in the Ithaca Directory was still near the top of the search listings, but still, what happened???

As it turns out, Search Engine “Optimization.”

See, DigiShop has a function called just that in their administration back-end. You click it, it processes for a few minutes, and then it’s done. There’s no description as to what, exactly the SEO function does in Digishop. I assumed it optimized some page titles and keywords for meta tags, etc. But after Google dropped Garden Gate, we took a closer look. It looks like the DigiShop Search Engine Optimization consists of nothing more than writing out static pages that duplicate every page in the store. Excuse me? That’s the optimization??? Maybe this made a difference five years ago, when not all search engines could parse dynamically generated pages, but these days every modern search engine (which is to say, all of them) easily do that. Also, they don’t look too kindly on new websites that contain exact duplicates of each page. They see it as an attempt to drum up keyword frequencies. In fact, that sort of action has a highly negative effect on your search ranking.

So that’s probably why Google dropped Garden Gate. We deleted all the duplicate content and submitted a Request for Reconsideration to Google about our site’s ranking. This may take weeks to get this all sorted out.

So let this be a warning to anyone who uses DigiShop. The search engine optimization feature effectively does just the opposite.