artbook.com

No <meta name="viewport"> on any template, and the stylesheet has zero @media queries — there is no responsive layout at all. The site instead does legacy dynamic serving (Vary: User-Agent): a phone gets a separate, thinner mobile page — but that template also lacks a viewport tag, so mobile browsers render it zoomed-out. Google has indexed mobile-first since 2019; this suppresses the majority of searches, which happen on phones.

Evidence — no viewport on 4 sampled templates; 0 media queries in the 23 KB stylesheet; Vary: User-Agent header · Semrush's crawl did not flag this — it's a Semrush miss

Shopify build · automaticThe responsive Broadcast theme renders fluidly on every device, with a proper viewport and real media queries out of the box. Resolved at the platform level.

Zero JSON-LD. Product pages carry only partial schema.org microdata (name, author, date) — no price, availability, rating, or breadcrumb markup. That forfeits rich results — price, in-stock, breadcrumbs in the SERP — across a 15,500-title catalog where they'd earn real click-through. This is the shift the client's own team flagged: Google now leans on structured data, and off-brand retailers that have it are outranking artbook.com on its own titles.

Evidence — 0 ld+json blocks; microdata present but incomplete

Shopify build · we build itWe add Book + Product + Offer + BreadcrumbList JSON-LD to the theme templates and Organization schema site-wide, validated in Google's Rich Results Test. Net-new — built deliberately, not automatic, and the single biggest lever on the retailers-outranking-us problem.

No rel="canonical" on any page. A book reachable through several category paths competes against itself; Google then picks the canonical for you — diluting link equity and risking the wrong URL ranking.

Evidence — no canonical on home, product, or category

Shopify build · automaticShopify outputs a correct canonical tag on every product, collection and page automatically, collapsing duplicate category paths to one authoritative URL.

Pages are served as legacy ISO-8859-1, and it's failing: the homepage meta description renders "Walther K�nig". An art-book catalog is full of European names — König, Düsseldorf, é — that mis-render inside the titles and snippets Google shows, cutting trust and click-through.

Evidence — charset=iso-8859-1; mojibake visible in live meta description

Shopify build · automaticShopify serves UTF-8 everywhere, so König, Düsseldorf and é render correctly in titles and snippets across the catalog.

In the Semrush sample, 85 of 100 pages had only one internal link pointing to them. Product pages are near-islands — that starves them of the internal link equity that tells Google which titles matter, and makes deep pages slow to crawl and re-crawl. It's the one high-impact issue the crawl caught that a template read alone would miss.

Evidence — Semrush: "Pages with only one internal link" on 85 of 100 sampled pages

Shopify build · we build itThe new collection architecture plus related-title cross-links give every product several internal links — a content-structure job we build into the catalog, not a switch the platform flips on its own.

The tag is Universal Analytics (UA-73369234-1), which stopped collecting data in July 2023. Two years with no organic measurement — and no baseline to protect when the site moves to Shopify. Not a ranking factor, but it means every claim here is un-instrumented.

Evidence — UA property, no GA4 tag present

Shopify build · we set it upGA4 and Search Console go in at launch, so organic performance is measured from day one and we have a baseline to protect.

The homepage description is ~600 characters against the ~155 Google shows — the tail is wasted. A legacy keywords meta tag is also present; harmless, but ignored by every search engine since ~2009.

Evidence — homepage description length; keywords meta present

Shopify build · we set it upTheme templates generate right-length titles and meta descriptions from patterns we set, and the obsolete keywords tag is dropped.

Only og:image is set — no og:title, og:type, og:url, or og:description. Links shared to social, Slack, or iMessage render a bare preview instead of a titled card.

Evidence — single OG tag on product template

Shopify build · automaticThe theme emits full Open Graph — title, type, url, description and image — so links shared to social, Slack or iMessage render as proper titled cards.

The XML sitemap is valid and carries lastmod — good. But robots.txt lists it as a relative path (Sitemap: /sitemap.xml) where the protocol requires an absolute URL, so stricter crawlers may skip it — and Semrush independently flags 4 incorrect URLs inside the sitemap (non-canonical or redirecting entries that shouldn't be listed).

Evidence — robots.txt relative Sitemap directive (Semrush: "invalid robots.txt format") · Semrush: 4 "incorrect pages found in sitemap.xml" — corroborated

Shopify build · automaticShopify auto-generates a clean sitemap.xml, referenced by an absolute URL in robots.txt and listing only canonical pages.