guys the other day well yesterday
actually i realized that i am what i'm
gonna call
shadowband from redbubble and when i say
shadowband
i need to elaborate what i mean is
redbubble in their uh source code for
products that i sell on their platform
they are embedding a piece of code
telling search engines like google not
to index my products meaning i won't
show up in search results when you
search directly for my product whether
it's by url by artist by title
you could pretty much search for the
exact keywords to where google would
know exactly what you're talking about
and you won't find my products and this
is actually more common than you
probably think i even built a tool for
you to check if your shop is shadow what
i'm calling shadow band if you have a
better name for it let me know but to me
it's like i you know google the number
one website in the world and redbubble's
saying hey no no no google don't worry
about it don't send any traffic from
google from you to us you know for this
artist so i'm going to link to that in
the description i'm going to walk you
through in this video how to use it
let's get started
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all right so the reason we are here guys
this is the piece of code
that not all redbubble listings have uh
and it's impossible for me to know if
it's the majority of redbubble listings
that have it or don't have it but what
you do not want to see
and you know hey if you're if you're
feeling like you want to put your web
developer hat on and not use my tool
which will make it a little bit easier
uh you can go into your account right
now go to one of your listings go to the
source code it's a little bit easier if
you use the developer console you can
right click and then go to uh inspect
page or inspect element and then in your
developer console control f search for
no index as one word
n-o-i-n-d-e-x if you find that if you
get a hit and you see something like
this
this is google well this is redbubble
telling google
essentially to
block search and indexing okay now this
is from google search central i'm going
to read what the no index value for the
robot's meta tag and i know nobody asked
for this uh i know
not that many people are web developers
this is stuff that i you know had to
learn on my on my way up uh climbing the
ranks of working as a web developer nine
to five
and even though it's not that commonly
used honestly uh because the default
value is index follow and so to say no
index that's as you would imagine not
common because most people want to be
indexed by google so it's i don't know
why redbubble's doing this
but this is what it signals to google
when redbubble puts this piece of code
on our listings
this is from google you can prevent a
page or other resource from appearing in
google search by including a no index
meta tag or header in the http response
when googlebot next crawls that page and
sees the tagger header googlebot will
drop that page entirely from google
search results regardless of whether
other sites link to it
so and the reason they say other sites
link to it is because that's one way to
climb the ranks in google search results
is to have other websites in kind of
relevant categories pointing to your url
because it kind of signals
uh to google's you know web crawler that
hey there must be something valuable on
that page if you've got all these
inbound links pointing there anyways
that's the lesson in the uh for the day
for search engine optimization and yeah
the fact that they're doing this is not
a good thing so now let me show you
the tool that i built it is ryanhog.com
forward slash shadowband and it takes
like 10 seconds to use so all you have
to do when you get here is put your
account name in there in that field and
then click am i shadowband
now shout out to the income stream
surfer i had done a video with him maybe
a couple months back
and we did like a little video together
talking about you know seo talking about
redbubble
his channel is definitely worth
subscribing to so i'll link to that in
the description he was the one that put
a video out that put this on my radar
i've certainly gone and looked at the um
you know meta data included in redbubble
pages before however this one either
wasn't there and maybe it's a new thing
or it just flew right over my head
because there is a lot of things you can
uh look at in source code it's hard to
just you know find like little things
that stick out however him being an seo
professional you know as his nine to
five job
he certainly went went in there looked
for it found it and put out a video
letting everybody know so shout out to
him
now he has a red bubble shop he has
multiple but he has one called italia
quotes okay we're going to use this as
an example to see if he's shadow band
from redbubble so what you need guys is
the shop name that's what we're going to
use to figure this out so i copied
italia quotes pasted it right here into
the shadow band and my shadow band tool
then i click am i shadow band and here's
the thing
it's it's not like yes no uh what it'll
do is it'll take you to google and it's
using some search operators that are
going to
basically filter out
uh
do i really need to explain how it works
i guess essentially what it's looking
for is it's looking for buy
your shop name buy dash shop name and
that should be included in the url for
the products you post to redbubble
now if you're not seeing a bunch of
search results and you see something
like this where there's five results
even though his shop has
11 products well then yes it appears
this shop is shadow band and you can
again go and confirm by looking at the
listings and finding the no index in the
source code when i look for my shop i
only see three results on google then i
go to my listings and of course i found
the no index in there uh for what it's
worth like just to confirm that not
every shop or not all products are
shadow banned i went to google
i typed in redbubble funny valentine's
day shirt v for video games because i
figured there'd be a lot of results
there was a lot of results so i picked
one and you can see here that yes it is
indexed by redbubble that's why it's
showing up in search result or it's
indexed by google pointing to redbubble
that's why it's in search results and
when we go to their product listing i
open up the developer console i do a
search for no index and i get zero hits
okay zero hits means no index is not
present and the default value there guys
is that google's web crawler will index
the page uh there's a lot of you know
nuance to me saying that but essentially
it means at a minimum it is eligible to
show up in search results because the
host of this page is not signaling to
google not to index them in search
results which i don't again i have no
clue why they're doing that um you know
i uh the income stream surfer did
mention that there were updates to
google's search algorithm when we had
that uh live stream that we did maybe
i'll hit them up for another one in the
near future if you guys want to hear
that want me to do that let me know in
the comments below that'd be great and
we can talk about this because maybe
redbubble did this in response to that
most recent update that we had discussed
in our video together and i can link to
our video together in the in the
description as well along with a link to
his channel by the way guys if you do go
into the source code one thing you may
notice is that there is an iframe
from a website called criteo.com i don't
know what that is but they in the iframe
include a meta robots tag with no index
as the value however
being in an iframe is not the same as
being in the actual web page for our
product listings on redbubble so this is
not one that you need to be worried
about if you do end up getting a hit
when you do the search however again you
don't even need to go this far if you
just use the the tool that takes like 10
seconds that i built uh and just put
your shop name in hit my shadow band
that'll pretty much give you the answer
that you need as i had mentioned in my
recent video for my redbubble 2021 year
in review i did get quite a bit of
traffic from what they call organic
which you see in dark purple behind me
and that is you know what what's lumped
into organic guys is included or
including and i would guess primarily
search engines they they actually say if
you look at how they define you know
organic traffic in there they say you
know google
yahoo bing and i know nobody uses yahoo
or bing so it's pretty much google so
we'll see what this looks like as far as
traffic sources by the way you can find
this on your redbubble dashboard you
know in your redbubble account
alright guys thank you for watching this
video as i head out just wanted to
remind you i do have a full print on
demand course that you can check out the
link is in the description it'll help
you start scale and automate your
business in 2022 guys please drop a like
on the video if you haven't already
subscribe and i will see you tomorrow
with a new video
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