Search engine improvements

With a prod, a kick and the occassional fortifying cup of tea, the latest Coriandr update went live in the wee hours of yesterday morning. Mainly concerned with improving site speed, nothing much will appear to have changed unless you look at the web address bar whilst browsing the site…

Can you see what it is yet?! Essentially we’ve gone through the entire site and updated all the ugly, old links with search engine friendly new ones;

old: http://www.coriandr.com/item?item=4791

new: http://www.coriandr.com/item/4791/mohair-cuff-gloves

Although modern search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc) can figure out what is going on in either situation, the new links are much kinder for us humans. Search engines have got some amazingly clever algorithms for calculating a link’s ranking, and anything that improves human readability is seen as a very good thing.

Item pages aren’t the only ones benefiting from this small, but significant change; shops, profiles and categories have all received a link makeover. Any old links floating around the internet will still work of course, but who wants browse http://www.coriandr.com/results?cat=10 when the listings are probably so much nicer in http://www.coriandr.com/category/jewellery/rings?

The upshot of all this is that our search rankings for both on- and off-site links will improve, and better rankings means more exposure, and more sales for everyone!

Feature update – managing your items

The eagle-eyed sellers among you will have noticed a few slight changes to the wording in the item management section of your accounts. These changes weren’t unnecessary fluff, but aimed at making item management clearer and to pave the way for today’s update! And what an update it is; not only quick re-listing, but the ability to use an existing item as a template for a new listing. I’m gonna use the rest of this post to walk through the new features and cover the basics of the other item management features, if you’d prefer to get stuck in; go straight to the  re-list an item page.

Quick re-listing

Any sold items will appear on the re-list an item page, with a button beneath them. Simply click on the button below the item you want to relist, and you’ll be taken to a confirmation screen:

Tell us the quantity you’d like to re-list, click the “Re-list item” button and you’re done; the item is instantly re-listed and added back into your shop! We treat re-listings in the same way as standard listings, so the re-listing fee  is a 20p x quantity and a re-listing won’t expire until it is sold.
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