For some time, we have been working at making Auto Web Engine, not just a greener company, but making our services greener. Using paperless billing and other “green” aspects to doing business, we have been pushing the “green” envelope more and more in how we conduct business.

Because of our recent server update, we are proud to promote that our services have become even more environmentally friendly with Rackspace’s Greenspace, a more environmentally friendly hosting environment. Below is a quote from their website:

Working with partners like NativeEnergy and The Green Grid, Rackspace is diligently working toward the goal of being a greener company. We know it’s not something that can happen overnight, but by addressing the problem and educating our customers and employees, we are taking the first step toward a cleaner tomorrow.

As Auto Web Engine looks to become a greener company, partnering with companies like Rackspace for our server needs not only provides us, and our clients, with excellent servers from which we can provide our quality services, but also helps us do more to lessen the impact on our environment.

If a dealer needs to have their data file automatically grabbed from an ftp location, they can specify this also.  Simply make sure the file is mapped out, then add an ftp location with proper credentials and save it.  The system will automatically grab the file on a daily basis and import it into the database.

As we grow, we try and get more and more functions into our users hands, giving more control so you can work at your speed, how you want.

Today we finished migrating our system to a new server network. Our lead developer thought to put a function on our old server so that we can track if any other sites are still using the old web service (API) so that we can notify them to switch to the new web service URL. He began getting tons of notices (roughly a bit over 10,000) that one or more sites were still hitting the old web service.

Now, flash back about 7 months ago. I registered about 10 websites similar to sacramentocarshopper.com. I planned on simply copying our zoomshop.com site over and then editing the look. I copied the files over for each, but never did anything else as development on other items had priority. We didn’t submit to search engines, didn’t edit any content… nothing. Just uploaded the files and left them.

Fast forward back to today. Marek, our lead developer, then asked about these sites that were on the server. I did some very quick research and found that each of these sites (the duplicate zoomshops we didn’t do anything with) had hundreds of pages indexed in Google, some more, some less, but they were indexed in Google - and we never, at any point, lifted a finger to submit pages, create an xml sitemap, optimize the pages for use with the domains… nothing.

Listen, all these large dealer services companies that charge dealers hundreds or thousands a month all have many bad design aspects in common when talking about their dealer websites. The use of Flash way too much, pages not using keywords, etc. But the biggest bonehead design for most of these companies is that their inventories cannot be indexed by search engines, causing dealer websites to loose out on hundreds of extra content pages to not be found in Google and friends. Heck, go on Google and search site:www.cars.com…. over 2 million pages, and after I went through the first 500, I didn’t find one single vehicle page.

After today, I realize that with Auto Web Engine’s API and script, Google comes looking for us.

The Race For Traffic Challenge is under way!

We are looking for SEO pros, web designers, web developers, and all those in between that are up to a challenge to prove the SEO capabilities of our API feed and script. This is a challenge, but it is also a contest (more details further down).

A little background info

Our system allows automotive dealers and classified site owners to pop in our PHP5 script into their websites, on their own servers, and feed in inventory for viewing like a normal website. So just imagine you, as a website developer, create a new automotive dealer website, or a classified site like Cars.com, designing the pages how you want, etc, then add our script into the vehicle search section of your website (no database required) and you are ready to go. The script will pull in a feed of the inventory into your website for searching, viewing photos, sending leads, etc. Take a look at Zoomshop.com, it does not have its own database, all the vehicles are fed in through our API.

Now, besides being simple to setup, it is completely SEO friendly. The script can be edited, modified, in any way the user wants for SEO and design purposes - it does not have to be framed into a site. This is where our challenge begins.

Click to visit the official challenge page and sign up form.