One of my main beliefs in SEO is that you should always get the basics right first and then move on to the more advanced SEO techniques.
It's really not that hard to make sure you don't have any broken links on your website, that all your pages load and that you remove any test files you may have uploaded.
If an SEO company cannot get their own website in order how are they going to manage yours?
I was taking a look at the Web Certain website and found a link in their site map to a file called test5.html, but when I clicked on the link I was given an error page. The funny thing was that the error page contained their site map which includes the link to test5.html!
Deciding to look a little more into this, I found a total of 10 pages that are all linked to but either don't exist or serve an error page:
http://www.webcertain.com/arabic-translation.html
http://www.webcertain.com/blogstemp.html
http://www.webcertain.com/e-zinestemp.html.html
http://www.webcertain.com/european-languages.html
http://www.webcertain.com/indian-languages.html
http://www.webcertain.com/middle-east-languages.html
http://www.webcertain.com/multi-lingual.html
http://www.webcertain.com/search-engine-marketing-home.html
http://www.webcertain.com/test5.html
http://www.webcertain.com/far-east-languages.html
This is a joke, an SEO company who claim to offer a "greater range of service from one team anywhere in the world" they can't even keep their own website in check!
Web Certain
SEO Experts?
I am always surprised when an SEO company's website is not fully optimised, has broken links or is just plain rubbish. It's unacceptable it really is, and the number of websites out there that fit this description is way too high. SEO is a highly technical and skilled talent to have and it has to be learnt, practiced and perfected over years of hard work. I think there are too many companies out there claiming to be "SEO Experts" when they are clearly not.
Over the next few posts I'm going to try and flag up some basic and obvious errors made by SEO companies.
Little Big Voice Have No Idea About Robots.txt Files
I was just checking out the Little Big Voice site again after my previous post and found that the site is not indexed in Google at all. Not one page!
Thinking that this was a little strange I had a look at their robots.txt file and found the following:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?
Disallow:
Disallow: /
Disallow: /*.php
Disallow: /?N=A
Disallow: /cgi/
Disallow: /stats/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /?*
The line in bold above is the culprit! "Disallow: /" tells the search engine crawlers that they should not visit any pages on the site.
Now, what would the reason for this be? I don't think this was done on purpose. It looks to me like a costly error! The robots.txt file was last edited on 9th August 2008 at 17:59:10 so it looks like it has been like this for over a month. You would think that they would notice that their site is no longer indexed! To find out the date a static page was last edited, type the following into your browser's address bar while on the page you're interested in:
javascript:alert(document.lastModified)
Checking in Yahoo shows that the site is still indexed, this highlights the fact that Yahoo is a lot slower than Google at crawling and updating their index (or it may show that Yahoo do not follow the robots.txt protocol!).
Yahoo Site Explorer also shows a number of pages that have been indexed at some point in the past and have now been removed from the site but Yahoo are still showing them in their index:
http://www.littlebigvoice.com/hotel-movenpick-aqaba.htm
http://www.littlebigvoice.com/athens/olympic_palace_hotel.htm
http://www.littlebigvoice.com/travel/34.htm
http://www.littlebigvoice.com/athens/hotel_emmantina.htm
http://www.littlebigvoice.com/resour/sites4_8.htm
http://www.littlebigvoice.com/resour/partners3_31.htm
Most of these are showing a 404, but the real question is what are they? Why were they indexed in the first place. It looks like another site was indexed on the www.littlebigvoice.com domain.
All round some pretty Bad SEO from Little Big Voice once again!