Three Ways a Test Crawl Could Uncover Hidden SEO Dangers

In November I wrote a post explaining how just one line of code could destroy your SEO.  It underscored the fact that sometimes hidden dangers can kill your SEO efforts.  In addition, it also explained how a thorough audit can reveal those issues and get your site back on track SEO-wise.  Well, I’m back with a new post about audits and SEO gremlins.  And as part of this post, I’m going to include information about one of my favorite tools (one that I’ve used for a long time – Xenu Link Sleuth).

n this post, I’m going to explain the power of a test crawl when auditing a web site.  You can learn a lot by crawling a web site, and I’m going to focus on three hidden dangers that can be uncovered by using a tool like Xenu.  And since the information is actionable, you just might be running to your development team once the crawl is done.

Xenu Link Sleuth – Free, Simple, and Powerful

I’m going to focus on Xenu Link Sleuth for running a test crawl, although Screaming Frog is another solution you can try (but it’s a paid solution).  I’ve been using Xenu for years and it’s a great tool for spidering a website.  There’s a wealth of information Xenu returns, including status codes, server errors, inbound links, external links, page metadata, etc.  As part of the process of auditing a web site, it’s always a good idea to run a test crawl.  You never know what you’re going to find.

Note, this post isn’t meant to be a deep Xenu tutorial that covers all of its functionality.  Instead, my goal is to show you three things you can uncover during a test crawl that could be hurting your SEO efforts.  Let’s take a look at what Xenu can find after you unleash it on your website.

3 SEO Dangers Xenu Can Uncover:

1. Server Errors

There are times I run Xenu on a medium to larger site and the report comes back with hundreds (or thousands) of server errors.  As you can imagine, having Googlebot encounter thousands of server errors isn’t a good thing.  The crazy part is that clients often don’t know this is happening, and that’s especially true with larger sites.

In addition, there are times those server errors are occurring on pages that the client didn’t even know existed.  Confused?  They were too.  In a recent audit, the CMS being used was dynamically building URL’s based on a glitch.  Those URL’s threw server errors.  And Googlebot was finding them too.  Not good.

2. 404’s

If you’re not familiar with header response codes, a 404 is “Page Not Found”. For SEO, you want to hunt down 404’s for several important reasons.  For example, are powerful pages on your site throwing 404’s?  Why is that happening?  And how much search equity are you losing if they are throwing 404’s?  A search engine will remove a page that 404’s from its index, and you could lose valuable inbound links that are pointing to those pages.  As you can imagine, correcting pages that 404, that shouldn’t 404, is an important task for SEO.

On the flip side, if web pages have been removed correctly (and throwing 404’s), the last thing you want to do is to drive Googlebot to a “Page Not Found” via your own internal linking structure.  That’s a waste of a link on your site (and it’s bad for usability as well).  Using Xenu, you can easily view 404’s in the reporting, export that report, and then work with your developers on fixing navigation issues.

3. Weird (and Potentially Dangerous) Outbound Links

Let’s focus on a more sinister issue for a minute.  Unfortunately, hackers are continually trying to infiltrate web sites, CMS packages, etc. to benefit their own web sites (or client web sites).

Here’s a simple question for you.  Do you know all of the pages you are linking to from your website?  Are you 100% sure you know?  Are you hesitating?  :)

For larger sites in particular, tracking down all outbound links isn’t a simple task.  If your server or CMS package was infiltrated, and outbound links were injected into your site, it can be hard to manually find those links in a short period of time (if you’re even lucky enough to know this is going on).

There are times I run a test crawl and find some crazy outbound links to less-than-desirable web sites.  And as you can guess, they contain rich anchor text that can boost the rankings of those sites.  And worse, some web site owners have no idea this is going on.  Xenu can pick up these external links and provide reporting that you can analyze.

Summary – Crawling To Action

Running a test a crawl on a web site is a smart task to complete on a regular basis.  There are several actionable findings a tool like Xenu can uncover, and at a very low cost.  Finding these simple, yet destructive problems can help webmasters improve the SEO health of their web sites.  And that’s exactly the goal of an SEO Audit.

Again, I just covered a few insights you can glean from a test crawl.  Try it out for yourself today.  As I mentioned earlier, you never know what you’re going to find.

Curtsey @  http://www.searchenginejournal.com/

http://seo-vempower.blogspot.com/search/label/Search Engine Optimization and Page Rank

Why are our hamburgers square? Because we don’t cut 
corners.”

– Dave Thomas

A long time ago I did an article on my personal blog comparing airline cuts to the fast food industry. I accused them of using something I call sesame seed economics. Three years later I’m still seeing that type of thought process used not only by the airlines but by fellow SEOs as well.
Sesame seed economics is more of a cautionary tale than proper economic theory, but it’s one that should be heeded by anybody making website decisions in an organization. I can’t remember where I first heard this analogy, but the story goes like this:

Every few years your local fast food chain hires a new MBA fresh out of college and tasks him with cutting costs. After several brainstorming sessions he comes up with a great idea. “If we only reduce the number of sesame seeds on our buns by 5% we could save a ton of money. It wouldn’t noticeably effect the quality of our product and hardly any of our customers would even realize it,” he says. It’s so brilliant and obvious that everybody buys in and the restaurant starts making similar changes. It works so well that the next year they cut the sesame seeds by another 5%. Fast forward a few years and suddenly the fast food chain is serving hamburgers on plain buns and nobody remembers when or why that changed but suddenly their quality scores aren’t what they used to be.

The airlines have certainly done their share of sesame seed cutting, but so have many of us on our SEO efforts. How many of the following sentences have you heard at one time or another?

“It’s only a small section of this page that’s in this iframe – it won’t matter.”
“Those terms only accounted for 3% of our search traffic, I guess it won’t hurt if they live in that ajax widget.”
“Who visits a site on their phone? We can use flash, we’re not alienating anybody.”
“Everybody uses IE – who cares if it loads in other browsers?”
“Page speed? It’s only a minor ranking factor.”
“Google’s not currently looking at social media, so why would we waste our efforts there?”
“Validation doesn’t matter – that much, just make sure it looks good.”

Sure none of these things will have much of an impact on your site by themselves, but when you add them all up you can quickly find yourself scratching your head wondering where all your traffic went. It’s really easy to give in to developers, IAs, and graphic designers – especially over things that seem minuscule at the time. Sometimes as SEOs we can get caught up in the big picture and lose focus of all the little things that can make our lives so much easier. Don’t be so quick to discredit the little things, because even the smallest seemingly inconsequential ones can be extremely powerful en masse – just ask Leiningen.


  Courtesy @ http://www.searchenginejournal.com

  http://seo-vempower.blogspot.com/search/label/Seo Online Training Sessions

Whenever you enter a query in a search engine and hit 'enter' you get a list of web results that contain that query term. Users normally tend to visit websites that are at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the query. If you have ever wondered why some of these websites rank better than the others then you must know that it is because of a powerful web marketing technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

   


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