SEO-Browser Updated!

We've updated the SEO-Browser!

You can now use it to visit sites from the US or Canada, which is very helpful for multi-country sites. More countries will be added later, as the demand grows.

Canada: ca.seo-browser.com
USA: us.seo-browser.com

In order to add this functionality, we had to put in a FREE one time signup. Don't worry, we don't share emails with anyone.

You can still use it in simple mode without a signup, but the advanced mode is starting to get too difficult to program without assigning users and sessions, hence the login.

Eventually, the advanced mode will add things like ranking reports, etc - all of which require user/password combinations for privacy and data storage purposes, so this is preparation for that.

Open Office VS Bing

It seems that MS Bing is either really bad at search, or is allowing it's results to be unduly influenced by either money or corporate policy. I'm leaning towards the censorship version of the story, myself.

Do a search for open office in Google. Now do the same one in Bing. You'll notice the complete absence of openoffice.org in Bing. They send you almost everywhere but to the right site.

Think that's odd? Or maybe just a coincidence? Try searching for "openoffice.org". Nuff said.

Here is the real kicker - Bing's automated recommendations and suggestions all clearly show people are searching for openoffice.org, but I guess that's just too bad.

For shame, Microsoft.

UPDATE:

Matt and Vanessa did some checking, and found it was a technical glitch, and not an evil conspiracy. Although I'm happy the net result is positive for searchers, I'm annoyed at myself for not checking deeper into other possible explanations.

Redirect Issue with IIS

I'm not sure if this is just an IIS 6.0 issue, but that's where I just ran into it.

A user of the SEO Browser contacted us today because the browser couldn't load his site. That wouldn't have been so bad if it wasn't for Google ALSO not apparently being able to load his site (it was unindexed). However, browsers loaded it just fine.

It took some investigating, but I finally found the issue. The site was set to redirect visitors to the domain root to an internal page. No problem. The redirect was the default 302 that IIS uses. Ok, a bit of a problem, but not enough to stop Google or the SEO Browser from loading it.

But buried in the HTTP headers ( I used SEO Consultants "Check Server Headers Tool") I found this directive:

FollowRedirects=False; Server requested redirection, but sent no new location.

Oops. If you set a redirect (301 or 302) but then say that you should not follow any redirects, strange things happen to your site as the two incompatible directives play out.

In this case, browsers (Firefox and IE) followed the redirect and ignored the server directive saying they should not.

Spiders (Googlebot and the SEO Browser) acknowledged that a redirect existed, but also acknowledged that the server was telling them not to follow it. Therefore they did what they were told and stopped.

Naturally, the fix is a very simple checkbox telling IIS to set the FollowRedirects=False to FollowRedirects=True.

I've never encountered this issue before, but I thought I'd share, since it might help someone out there in the future. I'll see if I can have this issue detected by the SEO Browser, as well.

Ian

PS I need to blog more often. I feel a New Years Resolution coming on...