Google

It always amazes me how much I've still to learn about selling online. I think I'm getting there and then I realise that I don't even know the simple stuff!

This week I stumbled across a thread in the Etsy forums which taught me what probably every one else knows - but I thought it worth sharing!

Someone was asking how you know if an item was cached by google. I wasn't even sure what that meant but apparantly if you type the title of your item into the google search bar and you can find it, it will say "cached". If you then click on that, it will tell you when google crawled your shop.

And what does "crawled" mean?
Well that is when google indexes your pages - usually people are talking about your home page as google does not crawl all of your shop at once. If you google yourself -for me AMIdesigns - & click on the "cached" link to find the date of the last crawl. For me, my shop was lasted crawled on August 31st.

Also, something else I learned today. You can find out if your etsy shop has been syndicated by clicking on this link -
http://www.etsy.com/syndication.php
Syndicated people get their items uploaded to Google shopping automatically. If you are not yet syndicated, then you will have to wait as it is being done randomly and gradually. But you can still be cached even if your shop hasn't yet been syndicated.

Hope this is helpful to someone!