SEO and the importance of 503

Today I arrived at work to find one of our, externally hosted, clients plummeting down the SERPS for terms that they would normally rank very highly for. As we always employ an ethical approach to our SEO campaigns I was a little bewildered by this sudden drop in rankings and decided to investigate. After a brief search through the Google results, there was the answer in the returned search listings.

Could not connect to database

This was the description on the returned results for our client’s website.

It would seem that when the site was last crawled the database was down and the client’s developer had returned the afore mentioned error message with a 200 OK header. So instead of our nicely optimised pages the search engines found zero relevant content and a server response header that said ‘Yeah sure! This is fine, this is what we want you to see’.

So what should we really be doing if a database connection fails?

We should be looking to our SEO friendly 503 (Service Temporarily Unavalable) header to let the search engines�know that there is a problem and to come back later. For details of implementing the 503 header there’s an excellent tutorial at http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/503-service-temporarily-unavailable.html

Dont get caught out. Check your SEO procedure for handling failed database connections and make sure you use the 503 header.

Add comment July 14th, 2008

Ignoring The Basics In The Rush To Embrace Web 2.0

With the immense hype surrounding web 2.0 are many companies ignoring the basic principles of creating websites?

More often than not, the web agency or web designer is at fault by trying to create something which is impressive to look at and, in an effort to embrace the web 2.0 ethos, has features that probably only 1% of site visitors will use. This can often result in having a badly designed website that is difficult to navigate and probably results in your customers moving on to the next website.

Lots of websites which use customisable features fall into this category where over 90% of the users will never use these ‘great’ features available to them. The development time for the extra features are often relected in higher costs for the client - resulting in very little ROI, if any. 

Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen held a presentation on this, highlighting some of the facts about our headlong rush towards Web 2.0. He warned that the desire to make webpages more dynamic often meant users were badly served.

E-Gain like many other web agencies use good practices include making a site easy to use, integrate good search tools where necessary, use jargon free text, usability testing and consideration to the design even before the first line of code is written.

Always ask yourself if you really need those extra features built into your website, and will the majority of your website visitors use or benefit from it?

Add comment June 24th, 2008