Renegade Search

Web servers are a lot like baseball umpires: when they're doing their jobs properly, you're barely aware of their existence. Of course, while watching a baseball game, you know that there are umps, calling balls and strikes and determining whether a runner is out or safe. But when the umps are really on their game, fans can safely focus on the players and the action itself. Similarly, I suspect that most web users understand that sites are hosted on some far-away computer, but this fact should never be brought to their attention while browsing the web, which is exactly what happens when error pages appear.

When an umpire blows a call, his presence on (and off) the field is glaringly obvious. Managers and players get ejected. Columnists across the country throw their two cents in. Fans boo. And one of the most common reactions typically sounds something like: nobody pays to see umpires.

And nobody (well, _almost_ nobody), wants to be aware of what's going on with a site's server. On the internet, the 'blown calls' become obvious when users see HTTP error pages. These pages appear when, for a variety of reasons, the server can't figure out how to show the user what they are trying to find.

Neither users nor search engines like to find error pages; they're frustrating and significantly hurt the user's browsing experience. If you own a site, you really do need to know exactly how, when, and why error pages are showing up for your clients. And most importantly, you need to know at least a little bit about what is causing the problem, so any issues can be addressed.

Unfortunately, like a lot of aspects of information technology, error pages weren't designed with much consideration into making them understandable. By default, most modern servers return a page with a cryptic 3-number code, and some jargon about the nature of the error. But unless you have a decent amount of training in systems administration, these messages probably aren't of much use. To help make these codes more understandable for non-geeks, I've summarized some of the most common error codes that you might see on a site, as well as steps that you can take to fix the errors.

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Something that consistently presents a challenge to SEO professionals is striking the balance between optimizing a website for search engines while maintaining effective on-page optimization for user experience. More often than not, a website will do one very well and neglect the other. The question arises, “If you could delegate your resources for optimizing a site for only search engines or humans, which is the better approach?” My immediate response to such a question has in the past been - what is the purpose of having a beautiful, user friendly website if nobody can find it in the first place? And while there may be substance behind that line of reasoning in certain situations, the issue is far more complex than that and such a reaction doesn’t capture the breadth of the problem.

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When we work with clients to revamp their websites and make them more SEO friendly, we often suggest that clients use text hyperlinks to connect their pages when creating new content. This topic can lead to some confusion, so I put together this handy blog post to guide our client’s into creating optimized and internally linked text.

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Today Google announced that they are rolling out longer meta description snippets for some keyword searches. The new feature will appear in search results for queries that are 3 words or longer and have a very specific intent. So for example, if you are searching for something like "Google Rolls Out Extended Snippets" you'll see some results that have longer meta description snippets (3 or 4 lines instead of only 2) like this:

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Every once in a while even the biggest of websites have server issues or temporary bandwidth problems. While we always push custom error pages for 404 pages and other applicable error codes for SEO and usability sake, it is interesting to see how the big boys handle such issues.

Here is the top part of the page I just saw when causing a 500 internal server error:

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