Questions created by JoshuaLindley
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Need Third Party Input. Our Web host blocked all bots including Google and myself because they believe SEO is slowing down their server.
I would like some third party input... partly for my sanity and also for my client. I have a client who runs a large online bookstore. The bookstore runs in Magento and the developers are also apparently the web host. (They actually run the servers.. I do not know if they are sitting under someones desk or are actually in a data center) Their server has been slowed down by local and foreign bots. They are under the impression my SEO services are sending spammer bots to crawl and slow down their site. To fix the problem they disallowed all bots. Everything, Google, Yahoo, Bing. They also banned my access from the site. My clients organic traffic instantly took a HUGE hit. (almost 50% of their traffic is organic and over 50% is Organic + Adwords most everything from Google) Their keyword rankings are taking a quick dive as well. Could someone please verify the following as true to help me illustrate to my client that this is completely unacceptable behavior on part of the host. I believe: 1.) You should never disavow ALL robots from your site as a solution for spam. As a matter of fact most of the bad bots ignore robots.txt anyways. It is a way to limit where Google searches (which is obviously a technique to be used) 2.) On site SEO work as well as link building, etc. is not responsible for foreign bots and scrappers putting a heavy load on the server. 3.) Their behavior will ultimately lead to a massive loss of rankings (already happening) and a huge loss of traffic (already happening) and ultimately since almost half the traffic is organic the client could expect to lose a large sum of revenue from purchases made by organic traffic since it will disappear. Please give your input and thoughts. I really appreciate it!
Technical SEO | | JoshuaLindley1 -
The "webmaster" disallowed all ROBOTS to fight spam! Help!!
One of the companies I do work for has a magento site. I am simply the SEO guy and they work the website through some developers who hold access to their systems VERY tightly. Using Google Webmaster Tools I saw that the robots.txt file was blocking ALL robots. I immediately e-mailed out and received a long reply about foreign robots and scrappers slowing down the website. They told me I would have to provide a list of only the good robots to allow in robots.txt. Please correct me if I'm wrong.. but isn't Robots.txt optional?? Won't a bad scrapper or bot still bog down the site? Shouldn't that be handled in httaccess or something different? I'm not new to SEO but I'm sure some of you who have been around longer have run into something like this and could provide some suggestions or resources I could use to plead my case! If I'm wrong.. please help me understand how we can meet both needs of allowing bots to visit the site but prevent the 'bad' ones. Their claim is the site is bombarded by tons and tons of bots that have slowed down performance. Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoshuaLindley0 -
Inches or " Feet or ' Does Google translate the symbols?
I have a client who sells things that the size is important. In their industry some people say "15 Inch Blue Widget" and others say "15" Blue Widget" using the symbol " for inches. On the page I know we could say both to cover all the bases but I want to get the title right. In their industry there is not one more preferred than the other. Does anybody know if Google translates ' to feet and " to inches. Should I work both into the title for a product or only one?
On-Page Optimization | | JoshuaLindley0