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
I Spy Search Marketing
I Spy Search are a relatively new player amongst the big names of UK search marketing agencies. Having been around for about 2 years they have yet to really crack in to the big time.
I was taking a look at their website recently and found a few things which I'll describe below:
- The CEO of I Spy cannot spell his own name
The CEO of I Spy Search is Christopher Whitelaw, but according to I Spy's contact page, his name is spelled "Chirstopher Whitelaw"
Upon looking in to this in a little more depth I found that this has been the case for at least the last year.
You might assume from this that:
a) There are no users using the site, or
b) The users using the site aren't very observant, or
c) No one from I Spy checks their own website, or
d) Chris Whitelaw doesn't use the site, isn't very observant and can't spell, or
e) All of the above
You'll also notice in the above screen capture the small blue line above I Spy's logo. This is actually an erroneous   that has been included in the logo div. This is actually on quite a few of their pages and again shows their lack of attention to detail. - I Spy Search News & Search Engine
I've always believed that if you are going to do something, then do it properly. If you are not going to do it properly, then do not do it at all.
It looks like I Spy decided to start publishing Search News, they had the new site designed with the functionality for a news feed, then decided not to do it.
Instead of removing the code, that enabled them to do this and removing the files off their live server, they commented out the links (using HTML comments) to the Search News page and left the files sitting on the server. You'll see a screen capture of the Search News page below:
Good old Lorem Ipsum!
It also looks like I Spy have developed their own Search Engine, or maybe they are still in the process of developing it, that's why the link is still commented out and the content is again Lorem Ipsum.
Either way, I'd love to see it and give it a test run!
Both pages are linked to from the left navigation and are both commented out:
- http://www.ispysearch.com/searchnews.html
- http://www.ispysearch.com/searchengine.html
Both pages also have Google Analytics installed, which, if it was being used correctly, should have flagged up the fact that these 2 pages existed. The version of Google Analytics installed is also the old code. - Screen Captures
Have a close look at the following pages:
- http://www.ispysearch.com/naturalsearch.html
- http://www.ispysearch.com/paidsearch.html
Better still, have a close look at the following screen captures:
- http://www.ispysearch.com/images/google2.jpg
- http://www.ispysearch.com/images/google3.jpg
Notice anything? A few things here:- Email Address
You can quite easily make out the email address of the Google Account of the person who took these screen captures. Big mistake! - Other Items
Again you can quite easily make out the user's links and tabs and see what they are looking at. This can be quite dangerous, as you can often give away too much, and give away things you don't want anyone else to see. - Cutting Remarks - A Question of Hair, Make-up & Beauty
Looking closely you can see one of the other tabs open in the browser is for a website with the title "A Question of Hair, Make-up & Beauty". A quick Google search and we can find out that this belongs to a website called Cutting Remarks. Nothing special here, might be a client of I Spy, might be nothing, but on closer inspection of this web page I found a link at the bottom with the following anchor text "Website Design, Online Marketing And Search Engine Optimisation By Hatch".
Hatch was interestingly enough one of the open tabs shown in the above screen capture! Now I got interested, so I checked out Hatch. - Hatch
Hatch have a number of websites:
- http://www.hatchpartners.co.uk/
- http://www.hatchfirst.com/
- http://www.searchengineoptimise.me.uk/
Looking at all 3 websites their SEO is not great, for example, http://www.hatchpartners.co.uk/ has a Meta Refresh to http://www.hatchfirst.com/.
But the most interesting thing is on Hatch's Clients page:
Now I'm wondering exactly what Hatch do for I Spy? Did they design their website? Do they do their SEO too?!?!
One thing is for sure, neither the folks at Hatch or the guys at I Spy can list "attention to detail" among their qualities!
- Email Address
Update - 25/06/2008: It's now 25th June, over 2 weeks since this post was made and no sign that I Spy have even read this post, let alone updated and corrected their site. I'm guessing they don't even have a Google Alert set up for their company name.
Update - 01/07/2008: I received an email from Nick Jones, a Director at I Spy Search in response to this post, which I have posted here: http://badseo.blogspot.com/2008/07/i-spy-search-their-reply.html
Little Big Voice: Something Smells Fishy!
Today I found 2 SEO agencies using the same graphics. Not ground breaking news I know, but when you're just starting out as a Search Agency the last thing you want to be accused of is ripping off someone else's website.
The 2 websites are:
www.firstfound.co.uk and www.littlebigvoice.com.
If you have a look at the FirstFound homepage, you'll see it looks something like this:
Now, compare that to the Search Engine Marketing page on Little Big Voice:
You've spotted it! Something smells a little fishy there.
FirstFound have been around for a while but Little Big Voice have only been around for less than a year, so I'm guessing it's Little Big Voice who have been doing the copying! But as they say, "Imitation is the Highest Form of Flattery"!
On the About Little Big Voice page it names Paul Keene as founder of Little Big Voice. Doing a quick Google search for Paul Keene brought me to his personal blog, www.paulkeene.com. He's got a nice link back to Little Big Voice from his About Me page with the anchor text "Search Engine Optimisation", now click the Photos 07 link. IT'S BROKEN. That's great SEO.
Looking closer at the site you'll see that the homepage redirects to http://www.paulkeene.com/Paul%27s%20Site/Welcome.html check the method of this redirection and you'll soon discover that it is a Meta Refresh!!
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=Paul%27s%20Site/Welcome.html" />
Awesome SEO from the founder of Little Big Voice, Paul Keene! NOT.
Quoting from the Little Big Voice site: "Paul Keene, founder of Little Big Voice has been working in the field of search engine optimisation since 1998...Building on the lessons of those lean times and the streetwise kind of expertise that came with it, he has worked hard to become one of the most web-savvy operators..."
YEAH RIGHT!