I’m having difficulty understanding why my products are not getting hardly any views. Some think it’s due to bad tags, bad designs, bad store design etc. BUT I have a technical question and wondering if it’s affecting things. When I put in my store name, google can’t seem to return it. It does return a result in a different country like .ca, and a couple links from others referring me. It even returns my new stores better with the same name, but with another word tacked on too. But my old store doesn’t come up at all. Nor any products in that store. Tacking on Zazzle doesn’t help any either.
It’s a really old store, started in 2018, so google had plenty of time to find it. BUT when I started it, I gave it a pretty dumb name it turn out I believe. It’s my last name, which is a common adjective too it turn out, then Designs. WelshDesigns is what I’ve used as a name for my work for 30 years or more. BUT on Zazzle I couldn’t use that name, so I decided to put not one (taken already?), but TWO underlines between the name words ending up here: “welsh__designs” . I think the double underlines is causing me a big problem. Search ignores it, and returns stuff as Welsh and Designs. Well that’s useless. Second and the more important question. On the source code in my page, there are two different spelling of my store name. One has a double underline and one has a single. So “welsh__designs” , and “welsh_designs” is in the source code which seems bad?
Because you can’t move products to other stores, I’m a bit stuck. And my zrank is a couple higher here than on my other new stores. Not that it’s helping search it seems.
Anyone have an idea if my concern is accurate at all?
You can change your store name, but not your website name. I agree that the underline(s) you used in your name might be part of the problem. If WelchDesigns is already taken on Zazzle, you can use your first name, too (like, for example, RyanWelshDesigns).
Thanks for the quick reply! This is helping. Things are certainly screwed up for me. Probably on my own account way back when I set up. There is an account with a single underline, Not my account, then mine with a double underline. BUT my actual stores don’t have double underlines. So my store, sort of looks associated to the other account that’s not mine! ugh! (technically not exactly associated, just super confusing)
Does the actual website URL matter in indexing search, or is everything coming off the store name? The reason I ask, is it’s my actual URL that’s fubar. IT has the double underlines which can’t be changed. My store names all had the single underline and searching on that correctly does return a few results in Goggle, but not near as many as I’d expect for a store that old. My new stores of like 6 weeks don’t return anything.
If the stores name is changed does that screw up any of the affiliate links, or like Pinterest links? I assume it will.
Do anyone know if the Zazzle product development team would help me remove the double underline on the URL or am I just screwed there?
Also as an FYI I just asked google’s AI about their search on words using underline (underscore) then double underline. Below is the reply (non of it’s good for me, I should have never used underlines anywhere at all)
Google’s reply to “what does google search do when words have an underline in between them or even a double underline in between them?”
That’s a great question, as the way Google handles those symbols can be surprising.
Underscore ( _ Google’s algorithm generally treats a single underscore as a word separator , similar to a hyphen or a space. So, if you search for my_search_query, Google is likely to treat it as if you had searched for my search query. It will show you results that contain those three words, regardless of whether they are separated by a space or an underscore. For example, a search for white_dog will show results for “white dog” and “white-dog”.
Double Underscore ( __ A double underscore is handled in the same way as a single underscore; it is also treated as a word separator. Google does not have a unique search operator function for the double underscore.
While you cannot move products from one store to another (without remaking them) you can add any product from any store to any collection. And then you can set that collection to show up in any of your stores.
I’ve got to do some thinking here, but I like this idea. I just don’t know if the URL link is important in search in any way, or if just the Store name is enough. And then there is the zrank, not sure how that affects things. But i’m getting little to no views, so currently it’s of no matter!
Z rank isn’t something that you need to worry about. If you’ve completed setting up your store, you should have a Z rank of 4. A number less than that means that you still have some store settings/items to complete.
Yeah, so everyone says, but why do they rank us then? This store is a 6, and my new ones are 4’s so I’m thinking I’ll at least change the name to remove any problems with underscores there first. See how that goes. And surgically play with collections across stores. I tried crossing stores awhile back and had trouble deleting products once added though, so I need to understand what happened that time.
tldr: Ok, I’ve don’t more digging and finally got what I think is happening, unless some Zazzle tech knows better. But from my limited technical experience I believe this is the root of my problems, probably from the very beginning of my store’s creations. In a nutshell I picked extremely bad names for my stores. Both in the words, and the use of the underlines or underscores. Using google’s AI to help me, here’s what it says, basically I need to start new stores and not use any underscores.
MY question to the Google AI:
I have a searching and or searching indexing question and I"m not really educated enough to ask it correctly i’m sure. I have a store on Zazzle, and the products don’t seem to get shown, they are certainly not viewed often, most not at all. The store is named Welsh_Designs, but the underlying name it seems to be opened with is Welsh__Designs notice the douple underscore, instead of one. The source code for the pages of products then have links with both the double and single underscores embedded in it. When it’s a URL address the double is noted, and when it’s the store name itself, the single underscore is noted. While both are problematic for searches I now realize, what exactly gets indexed for search engines. Is the URL ever used or needed?
I was waiting to give you a more definitive answer until I could consult my daughter, who is a web developer. She said what I suspected (and mentioned previously): using an underline(s) in your Zazzle URL and even in your shop name is problematic, as your Google research has shown.
Yeah, I’m convinced it is as well. What’s weird, I’m starting a new store to migrate over too, and low and behold Zazzle actually suggests using an underline in the name, since you can’t use spaces. AND you can’t use a minus - sign like Google’s AI suggested was a better alternative. My biggest problem was having two underlines, that was a huge mistake I never really suspected before because I changed the name to remove it not knowing the baseline URL didn’t. That and both of my name “nouns” were huge adjectives on the internet. Anyway I’m moving on! Ugh.
Google’s algorithm generally treats a single underscore as a word separator , similar to a hyphen or a space. So, if you search for my_search_query, Google is likely to treat it as if you had searched for my search query. It will show you results that contain those three words, regardless of whether they are separated by a space or an underscore. For example, a search for white_dog will show results for “white dog” and “white-dog”.
This store is a 6, and my new ones are 4’s so I’m thinking I’ll at least change the name to remove any problems with underscores there first. See how that goes. And surgically play with collections across stores. I tried crossing stores awhile back and had trouble deleting products once added though, so I need to understand what happened that time.