The Mucklow Blog

Marketing Manipulation Gone Awry

NOW I know why nobody's been buying anything at my Mucklow Store! I was starting to think that Mucklows didn't care about their proud family name. :(

CafePress, who hosts the store site, has a seriously dysfunctional weighting formula that it applies to keyword searches. The more popular your site, the more it bumps you up to the top. If your store is less popular, it docks you bad. (so the Rich get Richer' philosophy.) I have to admit that there are not that many of us Mucklows out there - relatively few in fact. However, their formula is screwed up in that it weights popularity SO MUCH that it weights MISSPELLINGS over DIRECT HITS. If you go to www.cafepress.com and search on Mucklow, all you get are about 30 hits for some Muckle guy selling Banjo art. My Mucklow Store is not even listed after his stuff, even though it is a direct hit on the search term. So, I asked CafePress if someone came to their site to find Mucklow emblazoned merchandise and do a search, do they REALLY think that they would by stuff with Banjo art on it instead because that’s what came up in their search, or would they just LEAVE? I hope the see the obvious answer.
They told me that they are in the process of converting to a MetaTag based search engine, so that should fix our problem when it changeover occurs (whenever that is.) We'll have to keep trying searches at www.cafepress.com to find out I suppose.

by Spoomonger @ 8:30 AM