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News > > SEO Problems With Template Websites
This is a story about someone wanting to trade links with us but finding out that they have a problem with their "robots.txt" file. Actually, it's more of a conversation concerning their website and finding out that their expensive template site is not as cool as they once thought it was.
With this dialog, we hope to shed some light on a few things to help you avoid these mistakes in the future. The specifics have been blanked out to protect the innocent 
----- Original Message -----
From: David XXX
To: my email address
Sent: Tuesday, January 03, 2006 11:38 AM
Subject: Link to David's website
Hello
I am trying to link to your site but get the following error:
“Please check reciprocal URL: Robots.txt prevents access to reciprocal URL.” But your site is located at ... What's the problem?
To which, I replied with the following:
| Quote: |
what that means is that you have a statement listed in a file called "robots.txt" in your document root (on your server) that does not allow search engines to index or spider your links directory or the page where you want to place our listing. We do not trade links with websites that "hide" their links but since you are asking about it, it is obvious that you are not doing it intentially.
What you need to do is remove or fix the statement in your robots.txt file and then try again. If you need more help, please let me know and I will gladly help you.
-eXtreme |
David then replied to me saying...
Thank you, I did not know that! This is the pitfalls of paying for a Real Estate web-site that is based on a template. It also makes web-site positioning on search engines very difficult!!!!!!!!
Take care,
I sent David a quick reply, "No problem bud. let me take a look at your site and I will see if there is anything I can do to help. please stand by"
NOW, HERE IS WHERE THE FUN BEGINS: After checking out his website, I found a couple of *sneaky* little things that his hosting provider is doing to his website...
| Quote: |
Hi David, after spending some time on your site, I have a couple of thoughts... (actually a whole page of them for you 
I would encourage you to snip bits and pieces from this email (or the entire thing of you like) and send it to your hosting people so they can help you...
First of all your website is very nice, clean and professional. Second, there is no reason why your hosting provider should be blocking your website from being indexed or crawled properly by search engines (and in this case, our reciprocal linking spider).
(And for those of you who are reading this message for the first time, there is a robots.txt file parked on David’s hosting account in his document root directory that is causing him problems, as you will read about in this dialog if you care to do so)
There is also a Meta Tag on his pages that is not particularly helpful either unless you don’t want visitors and certain engines to “remember the pages”:
| Code: |
<meta http-equiv='pragma' content='no-cache'> |
click here for explination number 1
or here for explination number 2
these links can provide more information about that. While potentially hurtful in terms of SEO Techniques, it is not as harmful as having a mis-configured robots.txt file in the document root; Hence, the point of the email.
Effectively, what your hosting provider is doing is blocking your website from being properly promoted and indexed by other engines and crawlers with that robots.txt file and personally I wouldn't pay someone to do that to me when your enemies will gladly do it for free if they had the opportunity. There is no reason that you should be disallowed to effectively trade links with other websites properly.
Basically, what your robots.txt file is saying is, “Hey if you are a certain search engine, spider, or crawler – stay away from this website or directory” Most likely, a systems administrator (who either doesn't know much about reciprocal linking or is using that as a security measure) has configured their server to not allow "spiders" to access certain directories and in this case - your links directory or possibly your entire website (which is absolutely ignorant). Ignorance is not necessarily a bad word, it just means that someone doesn't know what he or she is doing.
I will say to their defense, that it may not be ignorance - it might be there for a security measure to keep out email harvesters and other irritating devices that can cause problems, but there are other ways to safeguard against those as opposed to blocking all “robots”. Google however, is not blocked because you currently have a PR3 (page rank of 3 out of 10), which is actually very good. But as you know Google is not the only reputable engine out there though and I would encourage your system admin to fix your robots.txt file and your MetaTags.
Our job with this email will be to see if we can help them fix or correct your problem. If they refuse, let me know and I will gladly help you get your domain name hosted on a more effective server for you and your marketing efforts. You will however; loose your existing website as that belongs to them – you only control the domain name and your website content.
Not only do I personally maintain a number of websites myself, but we also provide hosting and support for a number of clients, so I have a pretty good idea what I am talking about. My intentions however, are not necessarily to steal you away from your current hosting company, but to educate you and them. As you can infer from the length of this email, it really irritates me when I see people being taken advantage of. That may not be the case as I stated above, but this email should help you get your problem resolved without causing too many waves.
For the new people who may be reading this and want to know more information on reciprocal linking, here is an outstanding article that I read the other day to help you get a better understanding about linking: http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2006/jan/2.html I would also encourage all of you to subscribe to the SiteProNews.com News Letter.
In conclusion David, I would like to see you get your problems resolved, but there is little you can do about it since you "own a website" that you cannot have FTP access to. Your site is nice, but if you cannot properly promote it – what potential does it really have? Be warned that if you switch hosting providers because of this, you will most likely loose most of what you already have EXCEPT for the marketing of it because YOU do own the domain name – don’t you?
Nevertheless, I will trade links with you on our network of sites if you can show me exactly how your visitors find our links from your home page. If I can see there is a “real” path to them, we will gladly trade links with you regardless of your website sending search engines to our sites or not. Wheither or not your pages are getting indexed is your problem unfortunately Thank you for your time to read this rather lengthy email and look forward to working with you.
PS David, do you mind if I also use this email on my "Webmaster Tips Website" for others to learn some of these suggestions?
eXtreme Webmaster,
SEO Expert |
David said,
Thank you for the response, I really have to take some time to look at this a little closer... Please, if you use these notes could you leave out the references to any personal info or specific wesbite but of course explain the pitfalls of template sites such as mine and how they tie your hands.
Again, Thank you, I have a lot of reading to do!
Take care,
Posted by admin on Wednesday, 04 January 2006 (08:55:19) (1835 reads)
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