SEO Improvements

Today we released some SEO-targetted updates to all Magnolia Box stores. We continually make tweaks to the platform, but today's update is large enough for us to shout about. In essence, what we have tried to do is to stop spiders indexing those pages that are of either of "low value" - in other words, pages that do not add anything useful or unique to the list of pages that are shown in, say, Google. By attempting to control the flow of so-called "link juice" through the site more effectively, any given page's "value" or page rank is concentrated on just the useful and relevant pages, and not wasted on pages that don't really matter. This helps search engines in several ways:

• When faced with a given user's query, it makes it much easier for the search engine to decide which one of your 20-30 similar-looking pages it should direct the user to...
• ...and this one page benefits since its page rank is no longer split across those 20-30 other pages.
• Spiders can crawl your site more efficiently, which is good for us and good for them.

An upshot of this is that you may see the number of your indexed pages in search engines actually go down. Do not panic; this is not a bad thing. We are not stopping search engines from seeing your any of your key pages, and we are not making any heavy-handed changes. We feel is it best to avoid lots of simultaneous or wide-ranging updates when it comes to SEO as it makes it harder to analyse their effect. We constantly monitor the SEO performance of our sites and this is just another step in our on-going efforts to give all our clients the best possible help in ranking well in all the major search engines.