For this week's website review, I'm heading down to sunny Florida in search of a jewelry store in Orlando.
Here's a screen shot of the local results when I searched for "jewelry stores in orlando":
I'm choosing the top jeweler, Tharoo & Co. Their website is:
http://www.tharooco.com/
This is what their website looks like on a desktop:
(click to view larger)
Notice how they have a popup that asks you to Like them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter. These types of popups are not uncommon, but less popular these days because they are an interruption in usability.
And this is what it looks like when viewed on an iPhone:
(click to view larger)
These types of popups are often hard to clear on a smartphone because you have to pinch-zoom to find what to tap to close it. The popup on Tharoo & Co wasn't too hard to clear on the iPhone, and certainly not as difficult as the similar type of popup on the JCKOnline.com when using a smartphone.
However, once you clear these types of popups, you would assume they would never bother you again, but that's not the case with Tharoo's site. The popup comes back every time you return to the home page. This is a serious blow to their usability and the last straw to less patient person. If I'm a new visitor, I do not yet know if I want to keep in touch with you socially; let's say hello first... Let's explore what you have, first; and then earn the continuation of relationship.
From a casual user's point of view, their website has a lot of content. There's a full product catalog, several pages of designers, and a lot of educational information.
When you dig deeper, you find several blank "coming soon..." pages and out of date information including this page which congratulates graduates of 2011.
Here's a screen shot of this page:
http://www.tharooco.com/newsletter.html
(click to view larger)
What's really happening here is that Tharoo & Co signed up with the company Blue Star Applications to build their website. Blue Star has an easy way for retail jewelers to set up a website fast. They have a standardized website structure and the ability to populate the pages of the site with minimal work by the jeweler.
Google doesn't like it when multiple websites have the same information. They call it "duplicate content." Originally they also didn't like if your own website had duplicate content, but they don't penalize you too much anymore if it happens on your own website.
I've previously written about duplicate content here. here, and here.
However, Google has spent a lot of time and money to clean up the internet and figure out ways to filter out websites that copy off one another. This filtering is included within Google Panda. Using Panda, they review all websites with the same content and determine which of them is the original. Sadly, there are many times when the original website is penalized and one of the copycats wins better ranking in the search results.
Back to the matter at hand with Tharoo & Co. and duplicate content. Take a look at the screen shot from this page here:
http://www.tharooco.com/education.html
(click to view larger)
The first sentence says "Buying a diamond is not something that is done without some forethought because it is, frankly, an important purchase."
I searched Google for that exact phrase, including the quotes, to locate other websites using the same content. This is what I found:
The screen shot above indicates "About 23 results" of duplicate content. Truthfully though, there's probably a lot more than that since Tharoo's website was not even included in that list of 23.
It is quite possible that the Panda filter is actually filtering their website out from the SERPs all together.
From this website review you can see that there are companies who can make the process of setting up a website easier, but the end result might not help you increase business at all.
FTC Notice: I randomly choose this website and won't be telling the retailer jeweler that I'm doing a review. Unless someone else tells them, they will only find out about this review if they examine their Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. I'm not doing this to solicit business from them, but rather as an educational exercise for everyone. This review is completely impartial and all my comments are listed in the order that I discovered them.
