Posted on Jan-29-2008
Acts of espionage in the Thailand SEO scene.
I recently did a 5 day SEO boot camp with a client in the adventure tourism industry. We did a lot of code updates to their site, worked on some link building and installed a CMS. The results were instant and as they had little to no SEO work done before. They jumped from an average of page 18 to page 2 - 3 by the end of our 5 day session.
So a week after I had left, their site disappeared again. Mysterious.When you have done SEO for a few years, you start to get a feeling of where things should sit. This didn’t sit right.Acting on an inkling the first thing I checked was the robots.txt.
There was the answer.
User-agent:
*Disallow: /
This basically blocks all web spiders from visiting all pages and directories on your web server. It seemed that someone the company had an association with had put this file on the web server to maliciously remove them from the search results.
A classic disgruntled ex employee move. Someone who knows a little about SEO and wants to do you wrong. Nasty business.
I know the business world is competitive, as is the world of SEO but that was a little too much.I shot the client and email and we altered the file the next day.
Things to take from this experience.
- Change server passwords frequently.
- Do a monthly check of the site. Things like robots.txt, server logs, webmaster diagnostics reports to make sure everything is in good order.
More Information Resources:
- A little bit of Information from Google about using a robots.txt file.
- The Wiki on the Robots Exclusion Standard- Official robots.txt website
