Erratic and Pointless SEV Results

steveraven said 1 year, 1 month ago:

I’ve phoned support up many times about this issue –

I have a 25 page website with a Wordpress blog and an SMF forum linked into the menu. The forum and blog are screened with a robots.txt file, leaving just the 25 pages for search engines to find – and this is indeed the case when using tools such as the SEOWorkers site analysis tool.

On using SEV to analyze the site however, it gives a reading of 837 pages, which includes all blog and forum posts, plus forms, mods et al, making the SEV results completely worthless. The ‘Controlled Crawling’ option has no effect on the SEV results, and leads me to ask –

If GoDaddy Search Engine Visibility cannot give a true indication of how a search engine perceives your website (as most other analysis tools do), by obeying the robots.txt file, then why should I continue to pay for it?

chrisg said 1 year, 1 month ago:

@steveraven,

Search Engine Visibility is an Internet-based search engine optimization and submission tool that guides users to optimize their website. It is not designed to read and exclude information from a robot.txt. However, it can be used to help create a rules file such as this for search engines to follow.

You may want to refer to the following article which explains what the Search Engine Visibility is for and how it is specifically designed to work:

What does Search Engine Visibility do?

Christopher G.

steveraven said 1 year, 1 month ago:

Ok, so thats the official explanation.

Now can I have an explanation as to why a tool called ‘Search Engine Visibility’ is totally misleading to purchasers in that I cannot use it to see how search engines visualize my website?

What on earth is the point of a tool that cannot be set to exclude pages that are not indexed?

What is the advantage of indexing 837 pages, 812 of which are not even pages?

How can the results of a SEV crawl help me when it is giving me over 1000 error reports on pages that do not exist?

And finally – Rather then posting a link to what SEV DOES do, can I have a reply to the issues above in what SEV DOESN’T do, and then explain why these faults (they are most certainly not advantages) are not pointed our to customers?

As it stands, the name ‘Search Engine Visibility’ is nothing more than a gross Trades Description Act offence of misleading information.

steveraven said 1 year, 1 month ago:

Postscript to my last post -

Google crawls my site and follows sitemap and robots files.

Other analysis tools follow my sitemap and robots files.

Why would GoDaddy assume that I wanted to PAY for something that behaves otherwise?

Rather than GoDaddy posting all of this official promotional material on SEV and what it does, do GoDaddy not consider that announcing the inability of SEV to crawl a website in the same way as a search engine does is ethically and morally more important so as not to mislead prospective buyers?

IS21 said 1 year, 1 month ago:

Hi steveraven,

Thanks for voicing your concern. This is actually a topic our team has discussed at length among ourselves. Search Engine Visibility has customers that prefer to restrict the major search engines from discovering pages while they build and optimize their site. Because of this, we made a decision to analyze all pages of a user’s site, regardless of what is specified in the robots.txt file. This way, a user can continuously optimize and analyze pages before they go ‘live’. Keep in mind, you can still analyze and optimize only those pages that are important to your SEO efforts, and simply ignore the pages that you have disallowed.

That said, I think you have a valid concern. I’ll revive this debate with the rest of our team.

-Ian

steveraven said 1 year, 1 month ago:

Thanks Ian- the most obvious solution I can see, is to have an option to either ‘crawl all’ or ‘crawl live pages’ – the latter of which would of course be a SEV analysis of the website as search engines see it.

Hope this happens soon!

chrisg said 1 year, 1 month ago:

@steveraven,

Thank you for taking the time to give this additional feedback. I will be sure to forward this over to our developers to take into additional consideration for their re-opened discussions.

Christopher G.

compuwarriors said 1 year, 1 month ago:

I have a similar issue with my joomla site, http://thecomputerwarriors.com. Most of the pages being crawled by the godaddy program were pages created in Joomla for E-mailing the article to a friend, printing the article, or saving a PDF of the article. I was able to go into Joomla and hide the icons for PDF, Print, and E-mail which kept those pages from being visible to the search engine visibility tool. Took my pages from 63 to 27. the robots.txt file did not help. Hopefully this helps even though my site is Joomla and not WordPress. I agree that new functionality should be added to the search engine visibility tool for crawling only sites available in the robots.txt file.

chrisg said 1 year ago:

@compuwarriors,

Thank you again for taking a moment to share this. I will also forward your additional comments in this regard to our developers.

Christopher G.

steveraven said 1 year ago:

I seem to have found a work-around for my own forum and blog issues, but I’m not sure how this could be implemented into a Joomla or Drupal scenario.

As mentioned earlier, I have my main website in the root folder. I then have an SMF forum in a subdirectory called /forum and a Wordpress blog in a subdirectory called /blog – both of which were inflating the SEV results to the point of ludicrousy.

My work-around is to create a subDOMAIN called forum and a subDOMAIN called blog and ensure that the respective /forum and /blog directories are now pointing at the subdomain.

All links on the main website pointing to the original ‘mysite.com/blog’ and ‘mysite.com/forum’ now need to be changed to ‘forum.mysite.com’ and blog.mysite.com’, after which SEV should now work properly.

chrisg said 1 year ago:

@steveraven,

Thank you for the follow up on this matter.

Glad to hear you were able to work around the Search Engine Visibility scanning issues of your SMF and WordPress pages. This information should be helpful to other members encountering similar issues with their Search Engine Visibility results till a permanent solution is made available in future updates.

Christopher G.