I guess it'd be this entire website (visual amazon search):
Reason for failure? Google doesn't index search results...
Reason for failure? Google doesn't index search results...
Regarding Google indexing the site, was that toungue-in-cheek? If not, you may want to consider some basic changes to the structure - I think its less that Google doesn't like your site and more that there's very little there to index.
And maybe you could show a little more information about the book when you click on it. I'm not sure what data Amazon provides - there must be more than just the picture, no?
I'd love to hear ideas for making something like this indexable. Generating a bunch of quality content around search results seems difficult (see: Mahalo), but maybe there's another approach I haven't thought of?
Just brainstorming here:
- maybe the hook could be: "judge books by their covers"
- the layout is pretty slick but constrains what you can do with the site. Have you considered scrolling down? It could be a differentiator though (your current layout that is).
- When you mouse over a book, have some type of overlay function: star the book, "have you read this book? what did you think?" (leave a comment), share on twitter / facebook (a necessary evil perhaps)
- when you click on a cover, it lightboxes in and has the things listed above
- make it like a reddit, but for covers
- people who searched for x also searched for y
It's basically all user-generated-content, and it actually does rank on Google for a few things, but it's the wrong kind of traffic: People aren't in buying mode, very few visitors actually click through to Amazon and buy something.
These are basically A/B tests.
1) Show the last 200 searches that people had made (or the most popular for the past day, week, etc.)
2) Instead of directly linking to Amazon upon clicking a book/product, perhaps you should fly out some hidden details for the item (not ajax if feasible).
3) You could also have a "Search by Author" and "Search by Topic" link that is provided when you click a book that provides more results with content.
4) Maybe allow people to create book shelves that they can explain the grouping of a set of books and why they go well together (etc!).
5) One last idea: Provide a list beneath that has a tiny bit more info - as they scroll left/right in the top list, have the bottom scroll up/down to show the range that is visible. This would help with you only linking/showing 20 or so results at a time if you let the list (text) show 100 or more.
Like another commenter pointed out you will need to create static pages for the search engines to find & index. You can do this by creating them automatically from the last x number of searches, if you were able to aggregate some other sources into the engine you could create custom landing pages showing all results rather than people clicking straight off to Amazon & having no dedicated page for each book title.
How low has the traffic fallen? If you can't get search traffic, maybe there are some other traffic sources?
Usually horizontal scrolling fails miserably, but at bigbooksearch it "feels" natural.