Are you hearing of Ford's new CPO program, certifying non-Ford vehicles?

[Anthony G.]

Traffic is good quality. Only 2 visits this week Yes I have exclusions so these are real numbers. 1 of these folks purchased.

 

[Dan Sayer]

@georgenenni Zero referrals to our FD sites from there but after searching the FBA site, and our VDPs, I don't see a link or CTA to "Visit Dealer Site" or the equivalent? Only our largest store had 3 leads in the last three weeks and all are from 60 to 400 miles from our dealership, which is odd.

 

[craigh]

Running a simple "site:" test, the attached screenshot shows only one indexed page.

These guys have their robots.txt file all wrong, which is likely what happened here.
https://www.fordblueadvantage.com/robots.txt

https://www.autotrader.com/robots.txt

1. They copied the robots.txt file from AutoTrader.com
2. It tells Indexing robots that the sitemap is on autotrader.com

They're basically telling Google not to index this site and to index autotrader.com instead.

Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/sitemap_certified_geo.xml.gz
Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/sitemap_new_geo.xml.gz
Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/sitemap_used_geo.xml.gz
Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/sitemap_dlr.xml.gz
Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/sitemap_mm.xml.gz
Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/sitemap_mmt.xml.gz
Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/sitemap_mmty.xml.gz
Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/index.php?sitemap=1

 

[George Nenni]

@georgenenni Zero referrals to our FD sites from there but after searching the FBA site, and our VDPs, I don't see a link or CTA to "Visit Dealer Site" or the equivalent? Only our largest store had 3 leads in the last three weeks and all are from 60 to 400 miles from our dealership, which is odd.

@Dan Sayer, do those stores subscribe to Autotrsder?

 

[Dan Sayer]

@Dan Sayer, do those stores subscribe to Autotrsder?

Nope.

 

[Dan Sayer]

These guys have their robots.txt file all wrong, which is likely what happened here.
https://www.fordblueadvantage.com/robots.txt

https://www.autotrader.com/robots.txt

1. They copied the robots.txt file from AutoTrader.com
2. It tells Indexing robots that the sitemap is on autotrader.com

They're basically telling Google not to index this site and to index autotrader.com instead.

Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/sitemap_certified_geo.xml.gz
Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/sitemap_new_geo.xml.gz
Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/sitemap_used_geo.xml.gz
Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/sitemap_dlr.xml.gz
Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/sitemap_mm.xml.gz
Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/sitemap_mmt.xml.gz
Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/sitemap_mmty.xml.gz
Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/index.php?sitemap=1

@craigh I just sent this to Ford

 

[Dan Sayer]

@craigh, Andrew Ashman, Ford Used Vehicle Manager, U.S., already replied that his team is looking into it. Gave you credit

 

[George Nenni]

These guys have their robots.txt file all wrong, which is likely what happened here.
https://www.fordblueadvantage.com/robots.txt

https://www.autotrader.com/robots.txt

1. They copied the robots.txt file from AutoTrader.com
2. It tells Indexing robots that the sitemap is on autotrader.com

They're basically telling Google not to index this site and to index autotrader.com instead.

Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/sitemap_certified_geo.xml.gz
Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/sitemap_new_geo.xml.gz
Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/sitemap_used_geo.xml.gz
Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/sitemap_dlr.xml.gz
Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/sitemap_mm.xml.gz
Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/sitemap_mmt.xml.gz
Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/sitemap_mmty.xml.gz
Sitemap: https://www.autotrader.com/index.php?sitemap=1

@craigh it looks like they are tweaking the robots.txt file:

User-agent: Vast_Bot
User-agent: YandexBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Tag Inspector Spider
Allow: /

User-agent: *

Sitemap: https://www.fordblueadvantage.com/sitemap.xml

 

[craigh]

@craigh it looks like they are tweaking the robots.txt file:

This is much better. It's the right site and it's at least the start of a good sitemap.
Glad they are acting quickly on this one - it should get indexed again once they submit it, etc

 

[Greg Spencer]

@Dan Sayer @georgenenni @craigh @Anthony G. Since Ford made these adjustments, has anyone seen a bump in referrals from the Ford Blue Advantage site?
The AIM Group's working on an article about FBA. Autotrader and Ford tell us that the inventory page gets much more traffic now than when it was operated by Ford in-house.

"Since FordBlueAdvantage.com launched in February 2021, we have seen tremendous growth compared to our CPO site, with average monthly page views up 450% and average monthly leads to dealers up over 700% year-over-year. We expect the site to continue to grow through the year. We currently have over 1,640 dealers engaged in Ford Blue Advantage." -- Ford rep, as quoted by Autotrader press relations.