I was checking out the Seatwave site the other day, www.seatwave.com, I have used them before to buy tickets to a gig and wasn't very impressed with their service. Yes, I got tickets to the concert, and yes, I enjoyed it. But, I paid a lot for the tickets and the service was pretty bad, tickets not mailed out to me, customer service couldn't help, slow responding to emails. In the end I had to go and pick the tickets up from their offices before the show, not the ideal situation.
Anyway, so I was looking around the site and thought that their SEO looked pretty average, especially for a venture capital backed company with £36M behind them! £36,000,000 is a lot of money, and for them not to be pouring some of that in to SEO really surprised me! They've got quite a lot of competition, with www.viagogo.com, who have also received a lot of funding, at least £50M.
I thought I'd take a look at their robots.txt file. I found nothing out of the ordinary in the first few lines:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /feeds/
Disallow: /WebUserControls/
Disallow: /tickets/buy/
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /err01.aspx
but reading the next few lines, I started to laugh!
Disallow: /msn.seatwave.com/
Disallow: /virginmedia.seatwave.com/
Disallow: /dev.seatwave.com/
Disallow: /stage.seatwave.com/
Disallow: /stage-en.seatwave.com/
Disallow: /stage-de.seatwave.com/
Disallow: /stage-nl.seatwave.com/
Disallow: /stage-es.seatwave.com/
Disallow: /stage-it.seatwave.com/
Disallow: /stage-se.seatwave.com/
Disallow: /stage-fr.seatwave.com/
Disallow: /abendblatt.seatwave.de/
Looking at the above lines in Seatwave's robots.txt file, you can see what they were 'trying' to do. The last twelve entries in their robots.txt file are subdomains, e.g.:
msn.seatwave.com
virginmedia.seatwave.com
and they are trying to exclude these from being indexed by using the robots.txt file on www.seatwave.com.
Nice try!
This got me thinking, "Who does their SEO?". So a quick Google search and according to PR Leap it looks like buy.at won their affiliate marketing, but nothing about their SEO or PPC. So now I'm thinking that maybe they do it in-house, or maybe it's been outsourced quietly.
Checking their Jobs page, I found they are recruiting at the moment for a Search Marketing Manager! and from the sound of the job description, they don't have anyone specifically doing the SEO at present.
Listen guys, if you're still looking when you read this then drop me an email on BadSEO (at) gmail (dot) com
Update - 24/06/2008: I received an email from James Hamlin (Seatwave's Online Marketing Director) less than 12 hours after I posted this article! Great response time James! It really is surprising how many companies don't monitor their company and brand names! It's good to see that Seatwave do! I love your video too!
Seatwave
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3 comments:
It's funny - you go out of your way to post about Bad SEO practices by companies, but don't really identify yourself. That leads people to question your motives.
Please don't think that I'm rallying against what you're saying, because a lot of it is pretty spot on. It's just odd that you don't identify yourself and make a point of publishing what makes you qualified to criticize these companies. Just a question...
Thanks for your comment Caroline. In answer to your question, I have no motive, I'm just posting about things I find that relate to SEO, websites, agencies, companies, etc.
I find it a little funny how you're questioning me and asking me to identify myself, when you don't identify yourself! Your Blogger profile is not publicly available. What are your motives?
I'm using my real name, which I suppose is a start in identifying myself a bit more than a username on a blog without any link to a profile. You'll notice that I've signed in with my own name and e-mail address, when I could have just as easily left an anonymous comment. It's a bit rich to accuse me of not identifying myself when you don't have a link to your profile or your name, don't you think? :)
There's nothing on my Blogger profile, sorry to disappoint your curiosity. I'm just Caroline Marmoy, and I've been working in search for a little while now. My motives? Nothing sinister, I assure you. I would just like to be able to qualify what you talk about with some concrete idea of your credentials other than critical SEO assessments which are readily available on SEOmoz, WebmasterWorld, etc etc. Oftentimes, people will rag on a company which they feel has "burned" them in the past, placing a bad review alongside other companies so as not to give themselves away.
I'm just trying to figure out which company it is.
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