If you sell on Etsy, you may be aware that the site has had some challenges when it comes to search engine ranking. Controversy erupted earlier in the year when changes to shop code temporarily caused shops to violate some important search engine rules.

Photo credit: MisterBisson on Flickr

Those mistakes were corrected, and Etsy took the additional step of hiring a search engine optimization (SEO) firm to review its overall search engine strategy.

One of the issues identified by the firm relates to how Etsy creates links to your shop. Until this week, shop URLs were configured as "302 redirects," which search engines interpret as temporary, rather than permanent, pages. 

That was a problem because it kept search engines from recognizing all of your shop's inbound links -- the sites that link to your shop. And that number affects your search engine ranking, called PageRank on Google.

The correction should, over time, give your shop's ranking a better chance of improvement. Of course, you still need quality inbound links to your shop. But be careful -- links from sites that the search engines define as "link farms" can actually lower your ranking.

When you do provide your link to other sites, be sure to use the new URL format of http://www.etsy.com/shop/username.

If you have questions about the change, check out Etsy's FAQs here.

Update on Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 12:50PM by beadjewelry

While doing some research for my book today, I looked a little closer at Google PageRank. It turns out not to be as important as we site owners tend to assume it is. So, even though Etsy's redirect change may be helpful, it probably won't do a whole lot to improve your chances of being found on Google.

Here's more, straight from Google's FAQ page:

Q: My site's PageRank has gone up / gone down / not changed in months!
A: Don't worry. In fact, don't bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it's easy doesn't mean it's useful for you as a site owner. If you're looking for metrics, we'd encourage you to check out Analytics, think about conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your website or business.