Comments on: Top 10 Giant Site Audit FAILs https://www.sempdx.org/blog/organic/top-10-giant-site-audit-fails/ Mon, 20 Apr 2015 15:56:45 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.1 By: Michael Cottam https://www.sempdx.org/blog/organic/top-10-giant-site-audit-fails/#comment-9237 Mon, 20 Apr 2015 15:56:45 +0000 http://sempdx.wpengine.com/?p=16177#comment-9237 Thanks Chris–good tip on the DNS wildcards issue. I’ve tended to avoid wildcard DNS and instead, manually set up each subdomain. Of course, there are some business models (like cheap subdomain hosting e.g. tumblr, blogspot) where you really need to go the wildcard route.

]]> By: Michael Cottam https://www.sempdx.org/blog/organic/top-10-giant-site-audit-fails/#comment-9236 Mon, 20 Apr 2015 15:54:54 +0000 http://sempdx.wpengine.com/?p=16177#comment-9236 In reply to Keri Morgret.

Thanks for the robots.txt monitoring tip Keri–I hadn’t seen that before. And the 2x Analytics one…I’ve seen client sites that have had that problem but hadn’t noticed the bounce rate effect.

]]> By: Chris Shennan https://www.sempdx.org/blog/organic/top-10-giant-site-audit-fails/#comment-9153 Wed, 15 Apr 2015 07:31:05 +0000 http://sempdx.wpengine.com/?p=16177#comment-9153 Great article. Definitely a few take away points. On the “Site of Many Flavours” section I would also include not dealing with a wildcard DNS records properly i.e. the site handle requests for *.mysite.com and doesn’t redirect to the www version when there is no legitimate sub domain. This will end up creating an infinite number of duplicate versions.

]]> By: Keri Morgret https://www.sempdx.org/blog/organic/top-10-giant-site-audit-fails/#comment-9151 Wed, 15 Apr 2015 04:13:16 +0000 http://sempdx.wpengine.com/?p=16177#comment-9151 I’ve seen the robots.txt for the staging site (which excluded everything) get copied over to the live site (which then became deindexed). I’ve also seen the live site’s robots.txt get copied over to the staging site when a data refresh of the staging site was done, resulting in the staging site being indexed. I used https://polepositionweb.com/roi/codemonitor/index.php to monitor the robots.txt on the live and all staging versions of the site to help catch these changes right away.

If the primary site is www and the non-www does correctly redirect, the following search can help turn up subdomains you didn’t know about:
site:example.com -site:www.example.com

Don’t order cake when you see your bounce rate drop to one or two percent. In an incognito window, check the source code to see if you’ve got two instances of analytics code running. I learned this one the hard way on a WordPress site. When I was logged in as admin, the analytics code via a plugin was being suppressed, so when I viewed the source, I was only seeing the analytics code I had put in one of the theme files, and not the second one from the plugin.

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