I really enjoyed this from Christine Churchill -- how all those "little" things easily overlooked can screw you up. Did someone shove a robots.txt block on your site? Did your domain expire? Those expired SSL certificates that freak you out! Mostly SEO-related tips, but not entirely, and a nice checklist of things to avoid.
9 Comments
9 Comments
Comments
The "are you blocking spiders thing" especially resonated since Vanessa was just talking about seeing this happen to someone she knows recently: http://www.vanessafoxnude.com/2007/07/18/the-first-rule-of-indexing-make-sure-youre-letting-the-site-be-indexed/ It’s so common. I don’t rank in Google! Well, you seem to be blocking them. That might be part of the problem :)
That’s a great article! It’s just reminded me to update and check domain expiry dates, maybe implement some failsafes. Robots txt now thats pretty funny, I betcha with all the kafuffle over duplicate content theres going to be heaps of messy robot files! Re the point Christine made about firefox, there also seems to be a lot of dev’s that have forgotten about backward compatibility to ie6.
nice post. so many simple things that get overlooked. my friends built a tool called Website Grader that does a baseline seo grade/checklist for best practice stuff, it’s a good way to get a quick check on your site. http://www.websitegrader.com
I tell ya ... the "Small is Beautiful" column sure is full of great writers, isn’t it? ;-) tee-hee!
I don’t know how many times a client has called to say they cannot reach their website only to discover that they had let their domain registrations expire.
The robots.txt file is no joke. We had an employee update the file for a new client and for months wondering why they were not getting any traction in the SEs. Come to find out (a few months later) that the the robots.txt file was prohibiting all spiders. Now for a little self promotion: A great tool for monitoring these pesky robots.txt files (and any other optimized page) for "unauthorized" changes is our CodeMonitor tool (http://www.emarketingperformance.com/tools/codemonitor/). Every 24 hours it checks for changes of any page you monitor and then highlights the differences. Pretty nifty!
Great resource. I hadn’t even thought of checking half of those things for my website(s).
It’s so true about sites that don’t work in Firefox, boggles my mind. Seems like it would be especially important when your product retails for $280 million/unit and your target-audience is tech-savvy. But apparently not: http://events.airbus.com/A380/default1.aspx What a POS. It makes annoying noises, is poorly designed, and doesn’t work in Firefox. You’d think they could do better for a $13 billion airplane. More: http://www.sharpseo.com/blog/index.php/archives/83
I find a bare minimum is to: - run each page through the W3C HTML validator to make sure there are no major HTML coding errors, - check the CSS for validity (I always make a few silly errors) using the W3C checker, - run the entire site through Xenu LinkSleuth and fix all broken links (you also get a handy list of all the page titles which can help you to optimise them and to avoid duplication), - and test a sample of pages in Mozilla, Safari, and IE 6 and 7. Finally I make sure that I have all my canonical URL ducks in a row, by testing a wide sample of site URLs (with and without www, with and without trailing / on folders, with and without parameters on URLs, and so on) to make sure that all except one variation return a 301 redirect to the canonical version.