HTTP headers

We’ve said it in 2009, and we’ll say it again: it keeps amazing us that there are still people using just a robots.txt files to prevent indexing of their site in Google or Bing. As a result their site shows up in the search engines anyway. You know why it keeps amazing us? Because robots.txt »

HTTP status codes, like 404, 301 and 500, might not mean much to a regular visitor, but for SEOs they are incredibly important. Not only that, search engine spiders, like Googlebot, use these to determine the health of a site. These status codes offer a way of seeing what happens between the browser and the server. »

Traditionally, you will use a robots.txt file on your server to manage what pages, folders, subdomains or other content search engines will be allowed to crawl. But did you know that there’s also such a thing as the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header? Here, we’ll discuss what the possibilities are and how this might be a better »

At the end of last year, a new HTTP status code saw the light. This status code, HTTP 451, is intended to be shown specifically when content has been blocked for legal reasons. If you’ve received a take down request, or are ordered by a judge to delete content, this is the status code that »

There was a bit of tweeting in the SEO community today because Bing introduced an HTTPS version of their site and people thought that would mean they’d lose their keyword data. That’s not true, if you take the right precautions. I thought I’d write a bit of an intro in how all this works so »

Last week I got a few messages from Google Webmaster Tools, saying it couldn’t access the robots.txt file on a site of a client. Turns out the client didn’t handle scheduled downtime correctly, causing problems with Google. While this article covers some rather basic technical SEO the last bit might be interesting for more advanced »