When you list a machine, your website makes a page for it. That page has a job to do on Google: get found, get shown, and send a buyer your way.
Then the machine sells and the page goes away. Whatever it built up on Google goes with it.
That’s not your website failing. Showing what’s on the lot today is exactly what an inventory page is for. But it means the pages on your site that change the most are the ones you’re counting on to bring buyers in.
A page has to earn its spot on Google
A new page doesn’t show up on Google the minute it goes live. Google has to find it, read it, decide it’s worth showing, and then start showing it to people searching for what’s on it. That takes a while.
So a machine page is racing the sale. If the machine sells in a week and Google takes three weeks to get to the page, that page never had a shot at bringing anybody in.
What we found on one dealer’s website
We dug into a real dealer’s website with their own Google Search Console, the free tool Google gives every website owner. We’re not naming them, and there’s nothing broken about their site.
- 1 in 5 of their machine pages were known to Google and had never once been opened by it: 171 of the 781 machines listed.
- 1,450 addresses on their site came back “page not found”. About half were machine pages that went away when the machines sold.
- Their inventory list, the way Google first gets it, had no links to the machines on it. Google found the machines through a separate list the website hands over.
- That list stamped every machine with the date you look at it, so Google can’t tell a machine listed today from one listed months ago. Google says it only uses those dates when they’re “consistently and verifiably accurate”.
None of this means Google can’t see your inventory. Most of it’s on Google. It means a page built to go away starts every race from behind.
None of it’s yours to change
Everything on that list belongs to your website provider: how the inventory list is built, what the site tells Google, what happens to a page when a machine sells. Most dealers couldn’t change it if they wanted to, and most providers won’t change it for one dealer.
What sticks around
The answer isn’t a new website. It’s pages that don’t go away.
A page about tractors for buyers in a town twenty miles from your store doesn’t disappear when a machine sells. It stays put and keeps building. For one of our clients, more than 36,000 times in six months, a buyer searched and the dealer’s own website didn’t show up at all. A page we built did.
You don’t need a new website. You need a search ecosystem built around it.