Not all watermelon hats are created equal

SEO 101 from Artfire

So quite a commotion has been going on in the Etsy forums. It seems that while many of us were fretting, wondering why our shops went the way of the Leaky Cauldron and buyers turned into Muggles, Etsy admin manipulated the meta tags of everyones shop listings making sellers invisible to search engines like Google and Yahoo.

I list my hats on several sites. You can view the HTML source by going up to the menu bar and view then source or right click view source. These Title headings are in between the title tags <>
I have edited my watermelon hat titles to the bare bones for some sites.
The title headings for my watermelon hat are as follows:

Etsy: Handmade for Children on Etsy - Watermelon Hat by bostonbeanies (64 characters)
Artfire: Watermelon Cotton Hat : BostonBeanies - ArtFire Children's (59 characters)
iCraft: Accessories, Hats - Watermelon Hat by BostonBeanies - icraft.ca (64 characters)
cosa verde: cosa verde Watermelon Cotton Hat by Boston Beanies (53 characters)
1000 Markets: Watermelon Cotton Hat by Boston Beanies (40 characters)

The problem with Etsy is the adding in the front the phrase "handmade for children on etsy - " all of those characters and spaces take up precious searching characters. Google and Yahoo often will not search after 60+ characters, and Etsy takes up half of them with their tagging, leaving me without my own title tags.

Check out Artfire, they add their tags at the back, that's fine.
iCraft is a little strange and puts tags in the front and back, with the category in the front and their id in the back. Strange and almost as bad as Etsy, note the same high character numbers.
cosa verde is simple, just their name and then my title, what you don't see is that there is a verticle line between verde and Boston, but still not bad, not too intrusive, and still under the character limit.
1000Markets doesn't even stuff the title tags, they add nothing, what you type is what you get.

I am not opposed to Etsy marking my listings on their site, but keep it simple, and keep it in the back end.

Before April, when I would Google and yahoo my hats, my Etsy listings used to be on the first few pages of hits, now my Etsy listings have disappeared because the spider bots that organize the searches have to crawl all the way through the other words in the title tags to get at the heart of my listing title.

But my Artfire listing shows up on page 1 or 2 usually. This is because Artfire lists to Google base (thank you!!) 1000Markets not yet, I am still tweaking to figure out why, and iCraft still needs work, but all are better than Etsy right now.

So what should we sellers do? We can't change the front tag stuffing, only Etsy Admin can, and they should soon. They get .20 per listing but over 3% per sale which is more than .20 per hat. Right now, with my visability down to zilch, why should I bother to relist? I am glad I have my own URL, http://www.bostonbeanies.com/ and now I may just redirect that link to my Artfire shop instead of my Etsy shop. I am in a wait and see mode, and am really upset that people are telling others that this is not a big deal.

We were all left in the dark while Etsy Admin let us flounder.
They knew what they were doing.

They. Knew.