There's a possibility someone in your company saw suspicious traffic from an actor spoofing the Baidu user agent. It can get so aggressive that it will eventually bog down your response time through sheer number of requests. But the problem is that same actor, or someone else with malicious intent can simply spoof another user agent or IP.

But the main problem is, the site is straight e-commerce. It could get international business, so why take such a ham fist approach? Even if blocking Baidu gave the desired result, the dev/admin would still have to block individual IP blocks as they come in. It would make more sense to invest in server resources so it can handle the load, or look into DDos Mitigation.

So yeah, it's strange. Though it's more likely a lack of understanding than anything malicious.

I would say more links and new/refreshed content would definitely have more to do with it than the presence or absence of a pipe.

With a pipe the title will be slightly longer. The example titles you gave seem on the long side, but nothing longer than most in that industry.

The problem with figuring out the benefit of these minute changes is that there are thousands of other changes that have occurred. Many of them are out of our control. So while you were experimenting with separators, another webmaster might have made a change that made a competing page or pages decrease. And that's just one example.

It would make for an interesting outlying case if your site/pages were positioned just so that one weird, seemingly innocuous, tweak made the difference.

If you've seen the first film in the Star Trek reboot, you might remember how Scotty figured out his transporter problem. Well, actually Future Spock just gave it to him - since Future Scotty was going to fix the problem anyway. But upon looking at the calculations, Scotty realized that space itself was also moving. Which was why his previous experiments were a disaster.

What I'm saying is, aside from 'I'm a dork', is nothing exists in a vacuum. It's very hard to determine if a tiny change had a positive benefit. There are so many external factors/moving parts. Though it would help reduce uncertainty if you didn't change anything else.

A couple of years ago, my first agency experienced this issue. There were a few queries I kept a sharp eye on, and the site disappeared for most of the day. The site couldn't even be found for the company name. Later in the day, the site returned to it's previous placement.

That happened a few months after noticing a couple clients received referral traffic from banyan.google.com, via Google Analytics. Basically, The Eye of Sauron was watching the properties. This didn't appear to bother the higher-ups, but it bothered me.

I had advised that they stop doing what they were doing, but they could see no ill end to it. They went on to survive the first Penguin. Penguin 2 proceeded to knock them out of the running. After I left, there was no recovery. They were happy to continue on their way.

Your site may return, but it's unlikely. Are the people that say it will return in a few days the very same that put it in the situation?

Oddly enough it only seemed to happen on the /Servers page - for me at least. The first time I loaded the page, I got a broken image and an X-Out/Close box. That may help you hone in on the problem.

Found the site. I'm able to recreate the problem. Check the image attachment.

I ran it through tools.pingdom.com, a chrome extension called cast_sender.js isn't loading. But something makes me think there's an issue with the CSS that only crops up from time to time, like the JS blocks it every once in a while. There's both a Global.css and a Global.js in the head. There are also folder levels called /Script%20Library/ and /Style%20Library/.

There's a ton of JavaScript on the site, which I don't have time to get into. And honestly, I'm more of a WordPress guy. I managed to make the page load fail a few times out of a dozen or so tries. I think something in the JavaScript is causing the issue.

Kmk8hFj

What happens if I move listings from one account to another?

How it was sold by Mihm at Local U Dallas was that Yext is pretty much like heroine. When you stop paying, the thrill is gone. And he positioned Moz Local as something different.

The documentation says that listings may go away if we stop paying, not 'will go away'.

So which is it?

Yext is fast, but it tends to create duplicates and inconsistent citations. Plus Yext is obviously one of the most expensive options. Moz is obviously slower, but it's definitely less expensive. Moz Local hits the high notes and I've noticed that I've had less issues with duplicates.

There's also a feature in Moz Local where you can nuke a duplicate with one button. With either one, you should probably still supplement your local campaigns with something like Bright Local or Whitespark.

I've used both Yext and Moz Local, but never the two in conjunction. There are also many listings that would become locked if you used Yext which could be counterproductive, and at least redundant, if you used Moz Local as well. I tend to look at it this way; "Do you want it done fast, or do you want it done right?"  If you quit subscribing to Yext, a lot of listings disappear and content added via Yext tends to revert (for anything they lock).