I was shown this in a client’s Webmaster Tools earlier this week:

We had carried out a number of 301 redirects on some of their pages, as for reasons known only to the original developer, a lot of pages had been created as sub-domains, which was causing duplicate content and indexing issues with Google.

What I wasn’t aware of, was that there isn’t any code in the site to auto-update the sitemap.xml file provided to Google Webmaster Tools. I hadn’t seen the error above before – clearly, Google is unhappy if too many of the URLs in your sitemap don’t match what it sees on the site. A lot of those URLs of co urse no longer exist (e.g. the sub-domains), so we have updated the sitemap using GSiteCrawler – it’s a bit techie, but it certainly does the job and can be scheduled to make regular updates with automatic FTP of the new sitemap.xml file.

So, if you’re making changes to your site, remember to update your sitemap.xml files!

I’ve been asked to do some search engine optimisation for classical guitar shop, Kent Guitar Classics. We’ve only just begun the keyword research phase, so don’t flame me for the site’s current SEO!

What I noticed whilst conducting that research, is that even for the name of the business (usually an easy number one spot unless you have a very generic business name), the site only comes second when using the “pages from the UK” option in Google. The number one result using “pages from the UK” is a page on the Venezuelan UK embassy’s website! As you would expect, Kent Guitar Classics comes first if you just search “the web” using google.co.uk. Here are a couple of screenshots for posterity:

A bit of investigation using a whois service like Domain Tools shows that the website is hosted in Oslo!

Why is this important? Well, Google’s search results are biased according to the country in which the search is being performed. This is because it knows that most searchers are looking for something local to them. Google uses lots of information to decide whether a site is in the same country as the searcher: the domain extension (e.g. .co.uk), the postal address on the site (if it can find one), the geographic-targeting setting in Webmaster Tools, links from local websites and quite possibly numerous other factors.

One other factor is the physical location of the web server, i.e. if it is hosted in the same country. Clearly, in Kent Guitar Classics’ case, it isn’t – it’s hosted in Norway. As a result, one of the big pointers Google uses to determine a site’s country of origin is way off. Naturally, I have advised Miles at Kent Guitar Classics to move server.

An interesting aside I noticed while researching the site’s setup is that for some reason, the deafult homepage for www.kentguitarclassics.com is index.html, but the homepage appears to be index.asp. This could be another problem for Google, as it doesn’t like “bounce”-type redirects. A quick disabling of Javascript and meta refresh tags using the excellent Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox means that I can see this page:

Kent Guitar Classics redirect page - click to enlarge

Examine the code, and there is a Javascript redirect to index.asp – not something that Google will take particularly kindly to. This could be because the developer originally used index.html and when the change to index.asp was made, they didn’t want to break peoples’ bookmarks, so they used a redirect to ensure everyone still got the homepage.

This is one of the problems with Windows web servers running Internet Information Server (IIS) – there isn’t an easy way to create permanent (301) redirects, because the .htaccess files used by Apache (the usual web server on Linux machines) mean nothing to IIS. Instead, you either have to code the redirect into the page using ASP, or make changes directly in IIS (or install an ISAPI filter), which on anything but a dedicated server, the host won’t let you near.

That’s a completely separate problem to the physical location of the server, but I thought I’d mention it whilst looking at that site!

Hopefully you’re familiar with Google Webmaster Tools, but you might not have used Live.com’s webmaster tools before (Live.com is the re-branded MSN Search).

Like Google, Live provides an interface to manage multiple sites, each of which you’ll have to verify by uploading a file or including a meta tag in your homepage. Once verified, you can check for crawl errors, tell Live about your XML sitemap’s location, have a look at your Page Score (an interesting feature that suggests similar technology to Google’s PageRank, although my previous one-page three-links website seemed to score a full 5/5!) and also view your backlinks, which has a handy filter option.

Although the web page only shows 20 links, you can download them all as a file to view in Excel. Here’s a screenshot from the account for my band, Heroes of Switzerland (not really a competitive business site!)

As you can see, Live reports 77 backlinks (some of which are from pages on the site itself) – Yahoo reports 861! (831 excluding its own pages). So, er, maybe not as comprehensive as you might like, but worth checking out all the same.

From some discussions around the web, it looks like Google might be altering the code in its results pages (SERP – search engine results page). Whether this is to deliberately stop rank checking tools (like Aaron Wall’s Rank Checker plug-in for Firefox) isn’t clear – it might simply a be a side-effect of some changes Google are making.

Hopefully the developers of these tools will release updates soon, but if you use one of these tools and notice problems, it could be down to these changes.