You're welcome

Hi, You must be excited. I know how much work goes into a redesign. Here are some things I noticed while browsing the site on a PC using Internet Explorer (yes, the nasty, unforgiving IE...the bane of Web Devs everwhere!!):

1. There is a problem with the placement of some text in your Contact Us forms (I attached a screenshot)
2. In the blog, the "Like This" gets stuck on "Like Loading"....kinda reminds me of a spaced out Valley Girl
3. When I click "Share This" I am just popped to the top of the page...and I can't really share anything.

Screenshots attached. Hope that's helpful!

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Hi,

Well in general I agree with Arjan, I am strongly of the opinion that some directories are still VERY worthwhile, and BOTW is one of them. When you are launching a brand new site, you just aren't going to have a lot of attention and inbound lin opportunities at first. Submitting your site to DMOZ (which is free), Yahoo.dir (Paid), Business.com (Paid), JoeAnt.com (Paid) and yes, BOTW (Paid) are all most definitely worthwhile. IMHO they send a signal to the search engines that you are a legitimate business. That's a very important message to send when you are a startup.

In addition to those I think there are some others that are worth it as well, depending on your particular business, particularly localized directories and directories targeting certain niche markets.

Hope that's helpful!

Dana

Howdie,

Yes, I believe we got this sorted out. Interestingly, it wasn't any of the suggestions made here causing the 301 status code responses. I posted a thread in Google Webmaster Tools Forum regarding the issue and received a response that I am 99.5% sure is the correct answer.

Here is a link to that thread for future readers' reference: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!mydiscussions/webmasters/zOCDAVudxNo

I believe the underlying issue has to do with incorrect handling of a redirect for this domain:  ccisound.com

I am currently pursuing getting it corrected with our IT Director. Once the remedy is in place, I should know right away if it solves the issue I am seeing in the server logs. I'll post back here once I am 100% certain that was the issue.

Thanks all! This has been an interesting one for me!

They are pretty detailed, I'll send you yesterday's in a zip file so you can take a look. I'm certain that have everything needed. Thanks Eric!

Thanks so much Eric. Yes, I was thinking about the mobile version of our site being related to what I'm seeing too. However, I am unaware that we 301 redirect anything from the main site to the mobile site. In fact, users can actually switch to the mobile site via desktop by clicking "Mobile Site" in the footer and then browse the mobile version of the site via desktop. All of the URLs are identical.

Just out of curiosity I browsed to the mobile version of our site, grabbed a URL and then plugged it into "Fetch as Googlebot" in GWT. For all options, including desktop and the three mobile options a status code of 200 was returned.

Here is the response from my IT Director regarding the possibility that this is being done by our DNS manager:

"I do not believe so. Our DNS does translation of human readable names to IP address. It has nothing to do with the status being returned to a browser, and even if it did it could not write to the log file."

Is this accurate? I understand that the DNS cannot write to the log file, but if the DNS can flag a request to receive a certain status code from the server, then this scenario would still be a possibility.

According to our IT Director we have no spam filters, no mod_security module, absolutely nothing on our server to prevent it from being crawled by bot, human or spider from any IP address, including black-listed IPs.

To me, other than the obvious (no security is probably not a good idea at all), that means that the 301 status codes being returned because of a problem with server set up.

I do have server logs that I'd be willing to share privately with anyone who's willing to take a gander. Don't worry, I won't send you a month's worth. 1-2 days should be plenty.

In the meantime I am going to dive in and take a look further. It's entirely possible that IPs from Google are not the only ones receiving nothing but 301 status codes in response to requests.

Thanks William. Good suggestion. I am on it! I'll post back here once I know more.

Excellent thoughts!  Yes, they are consistently the same IP addresses every time. There are several producing the same phenomenon, so I looked at this one 66.249.79.174

According to what I can find online this is definitely Google and the data center is located in Mountain View, California. We are a USA company, so it seems unlikely that it is a country issue. It could be that this IP (and the others like it) are inadvertently being blocked by a spam filter.

It doesn't matter the day or time, every time Googlebot attempts to crawl from this IP address our server returns 301 status codes for every request, with no exceptions.

I am thinking I need to request a list of IP addresses being blocked by the server's spam filter. I am not a server administrator...would this be something reasonable for me to ask the people who set it up?

Is returning a 301 status code the best scenario for handling a bot attempting to disguise itself as googlebot? I would think setting the server up to respond with a 304 would be better? (Sorry, that's kind of a follow-up "side" question)

Let me know your thoughts and I'm going to go see if I can find out more about the spam filter.

I have begun a daily process of analyzing a site's Web server log files and have noticed something that seems odd. There are several IP addresses from which Googlebot crawls that our server returns a 301 status code for every request, consistently, day after day. In nearly all cases, these are not URLs that should 301. When Googlebot visits from other IP addresses, the exact same pages are returned with a 200 status code.

Is this normal? If so, why? If not, why not?

I am concerned that our server returning an inaccurate status code is interfering with the site being effectively crawled as quickly and as often as it might be if this weren't happening.

Thanks guys!

You might try the good folks at http://www.goinflow.com/ - Everett Sizemore in particular. He gave a very good mozinar on eCommerce SEO here: http://moz.com/webinars/ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues  This is how I became familiar with him.

There are also two guys at http://www.melen.net, Matthew Prepis and Oleg Korneitchouk (Oleg is active here in the Moz forum) who performed a high level audit for us that was top notch. They were striving to win our business and are still in the running. They are excellent.

Either of these two might come in quite a bit lower than a company like RKG, depending on the scope of the project of course.

I completely agree with this. Well researched and reputable directories are still worthwhile. As long as they are part of a mix that includes some link diversity, I think they can be a very valuable way to jump start a brand new site.