SEO Blog

“Don’t Break the Web” is a rule that the Internet Explorer development team has been applied to six major versions of IE over the past decade, with each of these versions seeing the application of this rule in a different way. It is a rule may appear ironic for some, given that IE has been the source of many problems for web developers since the wide-spread adoption of CSS, and with the more recent popularization of standards compliant web pages. It is also a rule that represents the balance that the IE development team attempts to find between backwards-compatibility and interoperability (web standards), and a new post on the IE Blog this morning shows that the IE8 development team may have found the way to achieve this balance.

So back in mid-November MSN launched their own Webmaster Center Blog. As with the Google Blog this should provide a peek into some of the inner workings of the their own team of Engineer/PR/Evangelicals as they parade new MSNbot nuances to the throngs of awaiting enthusiasts. After sniffing around the blogroll today I noticed that one particular items was just put to bed. Having threatened to post about this ages ago, my procrastinating ways have lead me to the end of the saga without having weighed in until now.

The ‘Question’ related to the rash of bizarre search referrals that MSN was spreading around earlier this year.

The question was pretty much ‘where the heck is all of this search traffic coming from suddenly?’. Okay, suddenly meaning towards the end of August of this year, just like everyone else. So for an SEO Firm getting hits for the keyword ’search’, this could appear pretty flattering. Did I do something magical to suddenly send the MSNLive Bot into heat? Did someone hijack a PPC campain and we’re going to get a nasty bill from the folks at MSN Adcenter? After playing with those ideas for three to four seconds, it became brutally obvious that this was just bogus bot traffic masking itself with a search referral, thus triggering an entry into our Search Metrics. If I didn’t know any better I could possibly call that cloaking… The plot thickens. After spending some time reflecting on our Enquisite data a few items still didn’t ad up.

Google Webmaster Tools seems to be having some problems today with its web site verification process. Many of the sites we have listed in Webmaster Tools are no longer “verified” and the problem is reported as being due to “server timeout” and “domain name” errors. This is in spite of being able to navigate to the verification file using the link provided in the “Verify a Site” section.

This outlines the importance of frequently logging into Webmaster Tools to keep up to date on your sites search health and not assuming that this useful tool is “set and forget”. Google seems to be having periodic website verification and Sitemaps errors of late, has anyone else has noticed this?

One day last week a situation occurred with a client’s site that demonstrated how fast the search engines react to problems with a website. This story illustrates the importance of constant vigilance and monitoring of the health of a website.

The website concerned has around 4000+ article pages indexed, with each article page consisting of templated boilerplate sections and the main article text pulled from a HTML include file. Unfortunately on this particular day the directory containing the article include text files was accidentally deleted from the web server. Every article page subsequently served reported an ASP sever execute error as the article text include file directory was missing. The article include directory was only restored from a backup around 12 hours later.

Within several hours of the problem being reported it was obvious that the search engines had taken notice. According to the Enquisite search metrics data for the site, there was a definite and almost immediate reduction in search referrals. As it turned out, there was around 50% less search engine referrals that day compared to the preceding and following days. This demonstrated that the article pages had a temporary reduction in ranking, resulting in the loss of search traffic for that particular day. So what happened from a search engine point of view?