Zibbet Review: Why can't I find any Zibbet items in Google, owners Jonathan Peacock and Andrew Gray?

Zibbet makes me sad!

Ever seen a zibbet item in google search?  A Zibbet customer asked this question in the forums yesterday, while the owners Jonathan Peacock and Andrew Gray were there posting in other threads.  http://goo.gl/jcgKMd.

Maybe I missed their response?

I did see other Zibbet customers responding, all over the map.  So I did my own research.  Being that Zibbet owners only admitted when outed that they weren't submitting our items to 20 million buyers at The Find.com, as they had advertised they were, alarm bells went off, hearing that people couldn't find their items on google, either.  Not google shopping, Zibbet doesn't pay, like the other seller sites do, for our items to be found via Google Shopping.  But regular old google.

I googled these items:

Steampunk Earrings
Squirrel Earrings
Hand made Miniatures
Polymer Clay Beads

And wasn't finding any of the hundreds of Zibbet items matching those items in Google within 5 or 10 PAGES of items.  I found ebay, etsy, artfire, lots of stand alone sites, the find, amazon, books, blogs, no Zibbet.  Is it just me?   I  tried another browser, still zilch.

I asked a friend to try and find these items and again, no dice.  Now if I get overly specific, using all the words in a title, I can find them, but even then, the seller's stand alone and etsy shop outranked their Zibbet one, unless the exact order of words was used.  And what BUYER is going to use your exact title to search to browse?

Now this surprised me.  When I first began listing there, shortly after I bought a Premium membership, a few weeks in, I was finding my items.  And I sold several vintage items to people who obviously found me via google, they had to sign up to Zibbit to buy.  Right after Christmas, I searched again and wasn't finding my items anymore, but all the problems with Zibbet that arose from the C3 Church Twitter scandal were still swirling around that time, so I didn't really pursue it.

(I have since removed my items from Zibbet, I want my money back for my time and my fees spent there.)

So I had to search for other people's items, and I'm just not finding them.  Which is actually a better way to search, since google returns search results they think you'll like.  So you are more likely to find your own items anyway. 

And others aren't finding Zibbet items on google either, judging from some of the questions posed in the forums, and as of the time of this writing (12:31 p.m., EST on 2/14/14), no explanation has been given by the Zibbet owners.

But I'd sure like to know.  And I'm sure the other 9,000 plus people who have invested their money and/or time in Zibbet would, too.  Is it just me?  Let me know how well you do with searching for other people's items on google. Search the way a real shopper would.  Not by copying and pasting a title, but a more general search.  Like "steampunk earrings".  And let me know what you find. 

Is it just me?  Or did something happen between Zibbet and google that we don't know about?  Did the "pay for links" Handmadology scheme that seller ChuckEByrd warned was a "black hat" move that would get Zibbet penalized actually happen?  (Chuck was muted from the forums by owner Andrew Gray for that warning, incidentally).  Or something else?  Or nothing else?  Is it just me?  I have no answers, only questions.

Since Zibbet has no internal shopping traffic to speak of, is not paying to have their customers' items in Google Shopping, is not submitting to The Find as promised, not showing up on regular Google within a reasonable number of pages is pretty alarming.  We knew when we signed up that we would be relying on internet searches, not internal traffic, at Zibbet.  If they aren't being shown...what exactly DID we pay money for?  I want mine back.  Plus compensation for the time I wasted there.  How about you?
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Update!  It's the sellers' fault for not knowing enough about SEO.  According to CEO Jonathan Peacock's post in another thread, below. 

See, we're not supposed to ask these questions:
1.    Why aren't my items showing up in google when I search like a buyer does?  The purpose is to have BUYERS find our items!  Why do I have to almost copy the title to get a result from Zibbet?   We experienced sellers know BUYERS search for things like "maple leaf earrings", not a whole string of words. AND
2.    If it's the SELLERS' fault our Zibbet items aren't being found, because the internet is too "big" (???), then why do our items show up on Google with Etsy shops, Amazon, Artfire, blogs, stand alones, THE FIND, etc?  Just not Zibbet? 

You know, folks, you can't make this stuff up.  Every day the management of Zibbet outdoes itself.  To me, the following is just downright disrespectful and petulant. 

Permalink Reply by Jonathan Peacock (Zibbet's CEO) 1 hour ago

Hi Lee,

Firstly, just to clarify for everyone, whatever stats counters you install on Zibbet, using our "widgets" system, is INACCURATE. It will only count the visits to your shop from page and won't count visits to any of your items, your profile page, policies page, feedback etc etc.

Secondly, you can see if your shop is getting indexed by Google (as all Zibbet shops do), by Googling "site:www.zibbet.com/SHOPUSERNAME". In your case, you can see this here: https://www.google.com/#q=site%3Awww.zibbet.com%2FMammothIvoryCreat...

Thirdly, 42 Million results for "Mammoth Ivory" items means you're in a competitive space and means it would be extremely hard to rank highly in the search engines for this specific term. This means you need to try and be found using "long tail keywords". Long tail keywords is when you target longer strings of keywords that your customers my be searching for. You can figure out what 'long tail keywords' people are searching for using Keyword Planner as a guide.

Zibbet uses your titles and descriptions to sends Google the information they use to rank your items page / shop. This is just one of the many variables that Google uses to rank you. I have done a search for one of your item titles (which should be considered as a long tail keyword) and I found your item in the first position out of over 5,000 items: https://www.google.com/#q=+Fossil+Mammoth+Bone+Maple+Leaf+Post+Earr...

There are some really great articles on SEO in the Success on Zibbet blgo column. Have a wander through here if you're interested to learn more: http://www.zibbet.com/blog/tag/seo

Hope that helps to clarify. Zibbet absolutely submits your items to be indexed by Google and other search engines. One of the best parts about being with a marketplace such as Zibbet is that we have built up a lot of the things that Google looks for when deciding where to rank you. Sellers benefit from that.

If you can't get your shop / items ranking for your keywords, go for the long tail. The internet is big and competitive and there's millions of other sites trying to rank for the same thing. It all comes down to SEO. Learn about it and work on it if you want to rank better.