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How to resolve osCommerce search results show no products on search criteria

If you have a small osCommerce store and have a limited number of products added to the store, you might run into the problem that no search results show up when you type a product name or keyword in the search box. The message you would usually see says “oscommerce There is no product that matches the search criteria.

I ran into a similar problem recently when adding products to a small store for a client. The store had 6 products only, and each of them was manufactured by a different manufacturer. Since the products were related, I also did not add any categories or sub-categories to the web shop as I felt it was not needed. But this is where I went wrong.

Solution

If a product is not added to any category or sub-category, it will not show in the search results. So the solution to this problem is to simply make a dummy category, like “our products” and add all the products to that category.

This might sound like a really simple solution, but it works. You can simply hide the category box if you do not want to display it on the website.

If your products are not assigned to any category then they won’t come up in the search results, nor in the advanced search results.

Google Supplemental Results go mainstream

Google Supplemental Results Labels trashMany Blog owners and webmasters have been continuously upset about their new website and pages ending up in the Supplemental Index. Nothing to worry about now, as Google has removed the ‘supplemental result’ labels from the search results.

Google originally introduced Supplemental Results in 2003 so they could separate unimportant pages, and pages with duplicate content from their main index. The Supplemental Results were displayed as a result to queries made by searchers if no substantial results could be fetched from the main index. The whole idea was to make the search results more relevant and not to show old pages with little or no content in the Search Results. Learn more about Google Supplemental Results at ABCSEO.

Now, Google has extensively changed the way pages are indexed and added to the main index, which is why they are making the supplemental results go mainstream. Many blog owners, webmasters and website owners have given positive feedback about Google doing this, as they can put their efforts on new things and stop worrying about the Supplemental Index Results. Other searchers have shown their criticism as they will have to visit the Supplemental Pages when doing a search which might affect the quality of the Search Results displayed.

Check the official Google Blog where they announced this, and also the article at Search Engine Journal.

Google and Digital Millennium Copyright Act

I was doing a search for the KW ‘SEO’ today to see where my SEO Blog ranks on Google for the keyword 😉 However, when I reached the 4th or 5th page of the SERPS (my settings were set to show 100 results per page), I got the following error at the end of Google’s Search Results:

In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.

Here’s a screenshot of what I’m talking about:

Google DMCA

Some of you might already be aware of this, but this was really surprising for me as I hadn’t come across such a thing before.

You can read Google’s policies regarding the Digital Milennium Copyright Act by following the link.