Thanks Travis,

I have discovered that for some users the initial page loads up to 3 times nearly immediately without it being visual.  It never happens to me or any or the browser/system combinations I use on remote machine testing - even if I match someones setup who is getting the problem, but there is no question it is happening.  This was triggering the robot message I was giving.  I don't yet know the cause as the typical culprits don't apply.  I relaxed the rule by 1 more load in 30 seconds, which is why you didn't get a message.  Am going to use someone's computer tomorrow that gets the problem to try and narrow it down.

Agree on the human testing.  Thanks for the suggestions.

take care

Hi Travis.

Thanks for the info re Screaming Frog.

I didn't white list your IP.  I just changed the number in my files to something else, which would already be unblocked since a day has passed.

The scenario you gave would be quite rare and wouldn't create a block because that requires everything happening in 30 seconds or less (and the session wouldn't expire in that time frame), or that the same IP address also tried to crawl my site with a bot in the useragent (your scenario with screaming frog)..  But yours and Max's experience is looking more and more like it is commonplace, and I'm the fool who hasn't known that's what's happening because I can't distinguish between you and a robot (which doesn't keep sessions).

All I need is to verify that I have a sessions problem.  Here's what it takes:

1. use a desktop or laptop
2. remove all cookies related to qjamba
3. go to http://www.qjamba.com
4. choose an option (restaurants) and a location (Saint Louis) and click
5. dont do anything else - just close out the tab
6. If your ip address changes, let me know when you do this so I can find it in the logs

In all my usage it keeps the session between steps 3 and 4.  It looks like for you and Max it doesn't do that, which means many of my users would be having the same terrible experience as you, for the 3 months since it has been live.  It's a disaster.  But I have to first verify that it really is a problem and unfortunately I have to rely on strangers like you who are experiencing the problem to do that.

If you just do those steps I promise we'll be done

Thanks, Ted

Massimiliano, my guess of your path was the most logical conclusion based on the fact that I have 3 records of the urls you went to on my site, and showing that the program didn't keep any session variables between the 3 urls you came to.  You first went to wildwood.  Then you went to the home page.  This implies that you either did that in a new tab, or you hit the back key, or you modified the url and removed the wildwood part to go to the home page, as opposed to clicking on something on the page.  Telling me I'm wrong at least lets me know I may have a serious problem to fix, but you are mistaken to think that this is a robot problem.  It is a php session variable problem, apparently, that none of my extensive (hundreds of hours) testing has ever had.

This is a serious problem unrelated to the OP and about 100 times more important than the OP that I was hoping to get some help with because it is very difficult to diagnose without feedback from those having the experience that you had with my site,. However, that's my problem I'll have to deal with.  I don't know if you just don't remember or aren't telling me because you think it is a robot problem, but if you do happen to recall the steps (or at least tell me it was all done in the same tab or you hit the back key) I'd appreciate whatever it is you can tell me.  If I can't solve the problem it probably means I'll have to shut down my website which I've put more than 4 years of my life into.  Seriously.

Thanks for your various other responses though..  Take care. Ted

Massimiliano,

Can you tell me your steps that led to that error?  It looks like you went directly to www.qjamba.com/local-coupons/wildwood/mo/all   and then  you opened up a separate tab and went to www.qjamba.com  and then either refreshed the home page or opened the home page again in another tab -- all within 30 seconds.  That's the only way I have been able to reproduce this , because it looks for 3 searches without any existing session within 30 seconds by the same ip address, and the home page wipes out the session and cookies, and those are the urls the db table shows that you went to, and in that order.

Normally a user stays in the same tab, so with the 2nd search will have a session -- but your ip had no session with each search.  And, normally you can't go to the home page from a location page.  So, I'm confused as to what you did if it wasn't like what I wrote above.  If you didn't do this then I'm worried of a serious programming problem having to do with the php sessions getting dropped between pages.

I"ve put a lot of time into this website and a ton of testing of it too, and just went live a few months ago, so these kinds of problems are disheartening.  Ironically, your experience is almost identical to that of Travis, except that in your case you must have moved a little faster since you got a different message.  But, it would REALLY help me to get some feedback from both of you confirming what I wrote or setting me straight if you did something different.

Geez, I'm so pedantic sometimes.  Just need to understand what this means:

<<or, you="" make="" a="" new="" page.="" it="" gets="" crawled.="" <strong="">Checking if it's indexed... no, no, no, no, yes?! That's how long it takes.>></or,>

How do you do the bolded?  site:www.site.com/thepage "my content change on the page" ?

And, you did say one can change and not the other yet the page really has been indexed, right?

THANK YOU!

Thanks for sharing that.  I was only kidding above, but obviously it's no joking matter when a user gets blocked like you did.

I just looked and see that it blocks when something/someone clicks 3 times within 30 seconds. EDIT: but that's only if it isn't keeping the session between clicks--see next post

I'm sorry, but once I know they have crawled a page, shouldn't there be a way to know when it has also been indexed?  I know I can get them to crawl a page immediately or nearly, by fetching it.  But, I can't tell about the indexing--are you saying that after they crawl  the  page, the 'time to indexing the crawled page' can vary by site and there really is no way to know when it is in the new index?  that is, if it shows as newly cached that doesn't mean it has been indexed too, or it can be indexed and not show up as a site:www... , etc..?

Masimilliano, thanks for your input.  So you're on of them,huh?   Good points, the last thing I want to do is annoy users, yet I also want to track 'real' usage, so there is a conflict.  I know it is impossible to block all that I don't want as there is always another trick to employ..I'll have to think about it more.

Yeah the cut and paste blocking is annoying to anyone that would want to do it.  But, none of my users should want to do it. My content is in low demand but I hate to make anything easier for potential competition, and some who might be interested won't know how to scrape.  Anyway thanks for your feedback on that too.

Well, I'm ready to test -- but still not quite sure how since I don't know how to tell when Google has indexed the new content, since sometimes it doesn't get cache'd and sometimes it disappears from the site:www.. listing.  I've read it only takes a couple of days after Google crawls the page, and can go with that, but was hoping there is a way to actually 'see' the evidence that it has been indexed.

So, while I've gotten some great input, I am somewhat unsatisfied because I'm not sure how to tell WHEN my content has really been put in the index so that the algorithm is updated for the newly crawled page.

I think there's been a misunderstanding.  I'm not writing a bot. I am talking about making programming changes and then submitting them to Google via the fetch tool to see how it affects my ranking as quickly as possible, instead of waiting for the next time Google crawls that page -- which could be weeks.  I think the early reply may have given you a different impression.  I want to speed up the indexing by fetching in Google the pages and then look to see what the effect is.  My whole reason for starting this thread was confusion over knowing how to tell when it was indexed because of unexpected results (by me) with the cache and site:www... on Google.

Some of my pages are on Google's page 2, 3 and a few on page 1 for certain search terms that don't have a lot of competition but that I know SOME people are using (they are in my logs). and those pages have virtually no backlinks.  I want to boost those on page 2 or 3 to page 1 as quickly as possible because p1 is 10x or more better than p2. Time/Cost is an issue here:  I can make changes overnight at no cost as opposed to blogging or paying someone to blog.

Because domain authority and usage takes so long, it seems worth tweaking/testing NOW to try to boost certain pages from p2 or 3 to page 1 virtually overnight as opposed to waiting for months on end for usage to kick in. I don't know why Google would penalize me for moving a menu or adding content--basically for performing SEO on page, so it would be nice to be able to figure out what tools (cached pages, site:www. GWT, GA or otherwise) to look at to know if Google has re-indexed the new changes.

Of course, the biggest pages with the most common search terms probably HAVE to have plenty of backlinks and usage to get there, and I know that in the long run that's the way to success overall when there is high competion, but it just seems to me that on page SEO is potentially very valuable when the competition is slimmer.

What a great answer Ryan!  Thanks.  I'll tell you what my concern is.  As a coupon site I know that users don't want a bunch of wording at the beginning of pages.  They just want to find the coupon and get it, but from what I've read Google probably would reward the site more if there was beefier wording in it instead of a bunch of listings that are closer in some ways to just a bunch of links, resembling a simple link page.  I also have a 'mega-menu' on some of my pages which I think is pretty user friendly but have read that Google might not know for sure if it is part of the page content or not, as some forums I found talk about how their rankings improved when they simplified their menus.  Lastly, I have a listing of location links at the top of the page for users to 'drill down' closer to their neighborhood.  This is just about the first thing Google sees and may again be confusing to Google as to what the page is all about.

So IF the lack of 'wording content' and the early location of menu-type content is making my site hard to figure out from Google's perspective, I have alternatives and thought I could test those with Google ranking.  For example, I can enter wording content early on so as to 'beef' up the page so that it isnt just a bunch of coupon offer links.  I also could ajax the stuff that is above the 'coupon content' so that Google doesn't read that and get confused, and then put the actual links for Google to read down at the bottom of the page.  Both of those would be moves soley to satisfy Google and with no effect on the user  Google isn't perfect and i don't want to be penalized on ranking as a result of not addressing Google's 'imperfections', as it seems every edge counts and being on page 2 or 3 just isn't quite good enough.  I view this as reasonable testing rather than devious manipulation, but of course what matters with Google ranking is what Google thinks.

So in these cases the user response will be neutral -- they generally won't care if I have wording about what is on the page (especially if most requires clicking on 'more info') or am ajaxing the menu information--they again just want to find coupons.  But, if Google cares, as I have read they do, then it would be nice to be able to verify that with some simple tests.  It may be that my issues are somewhat unique as far as the typical webpage is concerned.

Having said all of that I do think your advice makes a ton of sense as the user is really what it is all about ultimately.

Thanks very much, and I'm giving you a 'good' answer as soon as I hear back!

Sorry about your being blocked.  A day hadn't passed due to the timing of your second visit--sorry.  I just changed the ip address in the table so you aren't blocked now.

Ok, I think I figured out what happened.  You first went to the ferguson site.  You may clicked on something but the same page was reloaded.  Then in a different tab you clicked on my home page from a google search results page.  Then in a third tab you went directly to my home page.  Then you ran screaming frog and the program stopped it without a message, seeing the word 'spider' in the useragent.  Then you tried it again and it recognized that as a stopped bot and gave the message about suspicious activity.

The program wipes out sessions and cookies when a user goes to the home page (it's not even a link anywhere) since that is just a location-choosing page, so when you opened it in a different tab the sessions were wiped out.  It had nothing to do with you being in incognito or not having cookies allowed.

Does this sound like what you may have done, and in sequence?

That's what it looks like, and that, if correct, is a huge relief for me since that is not usual user activity.  (Although I may have to reconsider whether its still a poor approach).

I don't know about what happened with your second visit and the timeout.  curious that you got some 60 pages crawled or so--I don't suppose you have anything that would tell me the first 3 of those so I can look into why it timed out?  The table isn't keeping the ip on crawling so I can only look those up by the url crawled and the time.

Travis,

First of all, I absolutely appreciate all the time you are taking to address my issues here.  Second of all, it IS very tempting to join you and any others here to go build houses or do something else, especially given the last few days..:)

Ok. I'll try to keep it short:

I wasn't thinking you had any bearing on my site going down, but that maybe there was a 'moz effect'.  hope not.

Re: Chrome Incognito Settings:
I'm really worried now that there is a sessions problem since anyone with cookies allowed should have the session ID saved between pages--in which case they would have only 1 entry in my 'user' table and you had 3 in a short amount of time.  That's why it thought you were a robot.  I don't know how to duplicate the problem though because I've never had it personally, and I use a program that connects to other machines with all kinds of combinations of operating systems and browsers and computers and have never had this problem with those.  It's my problem.  I'll have to figure it out somehow.  I have many session variables and it would be a huge overhaul to not use sessions at this point.  If you have any ideas (I'm using php) I'm all ears.

re:Fun w/ Screaming Frog:  
The IP for the 8.5 hour later instance was the same as your first one. Yet, if you were spoofing it shouldn't have said screaming frog in the user agent, right?  It was in my 'bot-stopped' file as instantly stopping because it was an unexpected bot.  So, confused unless perhaps you tried it separately from running with the spoof?

<<normally screaming="" frog="" would="" display="" notifications,="" but="" in="" this="" instance="" the="" connection="" just="" timed="" out="" for="" requested="" urls.="" it="" didn't="" appear="" to="" be="" a="" connectivity="" issue="" on="" my="" end,="" so...="" yeah...="">>
Ok.

Fun w/ Scraping and/or Spoofing:
<_>
I'll have to check into it.  I've run Yslow and Gtmetrix without problems.  I see you tried to run it on the ferguson page and the home page.  I just ran the ferguson page in gtmetrix - which uses Page Speed Test (Google?) and Yslow both - and it ran ok, although not a great grade.

<<while i'm="" running="" off="" in="" an="" almost="" totally="" unrelated="" direction,="" i="" thought="" this="" was="" interesting.="" apparently="" bingbot="" can="" be="" cheeky="" at="" times.="">>  That is interesting.

I'm worried now most about the session issue, as that may be affecting a lot of my users and I've assumed multiple entries were from robots that generally don't keep sessions between page crawls (actually quite a few of the seo crawlers do -- but google, bing, yahoo don't).  If you are ok with going to my home page without incognito and clicking on a few pages and letting me know the first part of your IP when you do that it might really help me. Your shouldn't be blocked anymore (it lasts 1 day). But, no worries if you're ready to move on.</while>_</normally>

Sorry, wasn't so short after all.  Thanks again.  Ted

Thanks Ryan.  I am new to this so I appreciate the cautions. Are you saying it is a bad idea to try and run tests on specific page changes (ie like reducing the size of a menu or adding more content in paragraph form, for example) to see how they affect ranking on given searches?  I'm struggling with why that is a problem for Google..  The SEO experts who run tests--to get a sense of what factors are important -- isn't that exactly what they are doing in a lot of cases?  I plan on using the MOZ tools and have much to learn, but it just seems so logical to test things out like I want to do also.

The GWT index status page shows an increasing number of pages, but no detail on which ones have been indexed.  That's why I was looking into the site:  command and the cache command in the first place.  It seems those exist for a reason, and I thought it was to help us with specific pages.  If that isn't it, why do they exist?  Other than showing the number of indexed pages I don't see much value to the index status page. Perhaps there is a good tutorial somewhere that helps people know how to use the GWT not just to find crawl errors or see general trends but to actually implement SEO page changes to improve their site?

I hope this doesn't sound argumentative..I just don't quite understand your perspective on it.

Thanks.  I will give you a 'good answer soon', but dont want to close this out yet since there are some other issues going on with the other response.  In addition I'm trying to figure out the practical way to use all this info:

Here's what I was trying to do:  Make a program change, fetch with google, and see in a couple of days if the site has risen in the rankings.  It was complicated (for me) by the absence of the fetched site being cached (which even the one you found is not a recent cache), and the the site:www... sometimes not appearing to have changed at all even if there was a new cache.  How is a person to test the immediate effect on ranking when they make a change if they can't tell what Google is doing?

I haven't found in GWT a list of my indexed pages, or the dates they were indexed, and certainly not the content that has been indexed, yet your answer above seems to indicate there is more under the hood than what i have found there. Is there really a way in GWT to see if a specific page has been indexed (my site has thousands so I would need to search for it), and when it was last indexed?  I can tell from my dbtables what pages and when they were crawled but not whether Google has added the new info into their indexing algorithm.

Thanks for your reply Ryan..

Well, that was easy.  How come for some pages they have that code and others they don't?  It seems like a backward way to find the cached version of your own pages too..

Thanks much.

Now, for a twist, suddenly I checked just now for site:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all

and it is no longer there.  It was there yesterday.  Why would it suddenly disappear?  I again checked webmaster tools--not finding any crawling errors or problems for it.   So, the question suddenly gets reversed: how now can I have a cached version without a site:www... listing?

Glad you didn't get frustrated.  Ok, lets see, there are a number of issues:

Screaming Frogs--I see the entry, and we know why it was stopped yesterday (robots.txt).

Your activity yesterday--I see 3 entries for you yesterday.  I'm very concerned I might have a sessions problem because if you had cookies enabled my tables should have shown only one entry for you with several searches.  If you didn't have cookies enabled you should have gottena message saying the site requires cookies.  Did you get that message regarding cookies for each page you went to last night?  IF you didn't get that message i may have a serious issue to address -- it would really help in this case to know which items you have checked in Chrome for the cookies settings.  I used the site this morning incognito without blocking cookies and my table showed just one entry and no blocking, so It would really help me to know what your setttings are for cookies, as I may have to program differently.

On your second visit last night:
First, did you run Screaming Frogs on that second visit?  Someone did about 8 1/2 hours after your first visit.

Re the scraping with your googlbot spoof: My program shouldn't block the IP for google ever, so are you sure it got blocked--did it give you a message?  If so I need to figure that one out too and it would help to have the IP you grabbed if possible.   As for the CSS and Javascript, I don't know enough about that--I don't think I have any hyperlinks in the javascript that it would find.  I have a both internal and external CSS and JS.

RE the robots file and googlebot: It's crawling ok and was verified in their Webmaster Tools, and the format I use is based on what I read.  While you are right that bad bots ignore robots.txt. I want to keep a lot of the neutral or even 'good' bots out, so thats why I do it that way.  I have htaccess blocking too, although its never a perfect thing..

RE: the ferguson page OP issue   While I haven't formally submitted the ferguson page (how'd you like that for a city choice?) to google via a site map (that's a long story), google has been crawling that page since at least November 15, 2014.  I don't know if a cache existed at that time as that is something I have just learned about in the last few days after I was trying to figure out if Google indexed some changes I put in before fetching just a few days ago.

Re this:<_>  I"m not sure what a noarchive directive is, so I'd have to say probably not on that one.

Thanks for whatever more help you can provide--I really hope to solve that session issue if it exists (as that has been a concern for several months but I wasn't sure how distinguish between a robot (which doesn't keep sessions) and a real user -- like you! ), and of course the actual OP issue too!_

p.s my server/site was down this morning and my host didn't know why.  Is it a bad idea to put one's website urls on the moz forum like I have (ie bad bots crawl the moz site looking for urls to torture?)

HI Travis,

Thanks you for your reply and I'm sorry for the frustration.  I looked at my db tables to try and figure out which one was you and what actions you took so I could diagnose why it gave you that message.  Sounds like I should relax the restrictions on user actions.

I know it would be tempting to ignore me at this point but it really could help me if I can find your activity in my dbase records that the program keeps so I can come up with a better solution.Could you give me part of your IP address so I can try and find your activity in my dbase table records so I can solve the problem that gave you that irritating message?  I would really appreciate it, as there actually may be an underlying problem with how it is storing sessions that I've had a real hard time pinpointing because it is very hard to distinguish real users that the program is having a sessions problem for from a returning robot that never keeps session cookies.

As for the robots.txt file, I purposefully block all but a handful of crawlers to avoid getting bombarded by crawlers which can slow down my site, and make it difficult to gauge real users.  This is nothing new for my site, and Google crawls my site every day.  So, I think perhaps you tried using a tool on it that it blocked and I'm sorry for any confusion that caused. Which tool did you use?

I'm somewhat new to robot activity and how to deal with the pesky guys without causing user problems, so am open to suggestions.

While I don't think these problems you had relate directly to the OP I certainly can see how they would relate to anyone trying to address the OP with a tool-oriented or hands on interaction with my site--again sorry for the frustration. Thanks for your feedback.

Here's an example:

I get a 404 error for this:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all

But a search for qjamba restaurant coupons gives a clear result as does this:

site:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all

What is going on?  How can this page be indexed but not in the Google cache?

I should make clear that the page is not showing up with any kind of error in webmaster tools, and Google has been crawling pages just fine.  This particular page was fetched by Google yesterday with no problems, and even crawled again twice today by Google  Yet, no cache.

Thanks Ray.  Appreciate the advice!

Hi Ray-pp,

Thanks for your answer.  I'm not getting anything significant, but occasionally a bot will come with extra stuff added to the parameter names, so it got me to thinking a malicious program or nasty competitor might want to do that to cause havoc.  My understanding is that 404s don't hurt SEO ranking from Google, but I was thinking that the way things are set up now no-one would get a 404 and in fact Google would index the 'bad' pages, so maybe I needed to do something proactively to 404 or 301 such pages so they would never get put into an index at all.

Since my site has lots of dynamically generated pages, I've had my share of surprises, and am just trying to avoid any new ones!

It occurs to me that a malicious program could set up thousands of links to dummy pages on a website:

www.mysite.com/dynamicpage/dummy123

www.mysite.com/dynamicpage/dummy456

etc..

How is this normally handled?  Does a developer have to look at all the parameters to see if they are valid and if not, automatically create a 301 redirect or 404 not found? This requires a table lookup of acceptable url parameters for all new visitors.

I was thinking that bad url names would be rare so it would be ok to just stop the program with a message, until I realized someone could intentionally set up links to non existent pages on a site.

Thanks Amelia!

Matt, thanks.. Good points for sure.  My concern is that since something like 50% of new businesses close doors within 5 years, so the list of redirected urls will just keep getting bigger over time..Is that a concern?  I guess over time less people will link to the defunct businesses, but I will still have to track them..maybe at some point when the number of links to them is small it would make sense to then 404 them?  Of course, I'd still need to track which ones to 404, so i'm now wondering when 404 ever makes sense on prior legitimate pages..

Just to be clear -- redirecting does remove the old link from the index, right?

It doesn't make sense to me that a 404 causes a loss in link juice, although that is what I've read.  What if you have a page that is legitimate -- think of a merchant oriented page where you sell an item for a given merchant --, and then the merchant closes his doors.  It makes little sense 5 years later to still have their merchant page so why would removing them from your site in any way hurt your site?  I could redirect forever but that makes little sense.  What makes sense to me is keeping the page for a while with an explanation and options for 'similar' products, and then eventually putting in a 404.  I would think the eventual dropping out of the index actually REDUCES the overall link juice (ie less pages), so there is no harm in using a 404 in this way.  It also is a way to avoid the site just getting bigger and bigger and having more and more 'bad' user experiences over time.

Am I looking at it wrong?

ps I've included this in 'link building' because it is related in a sense -- link 'paring'.