I recently bought an old directory focused domain (similar to dmoz and yahoo dir), which I’m in the midst of building out and adding relevant sites. As I was concentrating on my ‘Arts’ category, an old painting website came to mind - Next Monet - one I used to visit and window shop quite frequently, but had simply fallen off my radar.
I initially forgot the name, but remembered the ‘Monet’ portion, so I searched in google.. ‘my monet’, not it. ‘buy monet’, nope. Then the actual name popped in my head.
So I google searched it, ‘next monet’……….*no results*
uh-oh, maybe they got pinged running some nasty seo…
I knew the site still existed, so I typed the name in the address bar, and up it came. When I looked around, though, the site didn’t seem penalized. Still appeared to be a trusted site. Then I glanced at their source code and found this:
meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”
…a noindex…..and…..a nofollow…on an ecommerce website….hmmm…customers are overrated I guess..
In their defense, maybe they have some sort of search engine specific no-compete with the artists they represent? (Not likely)
Could it be they decided to layoff ‘Jack the web guy’ to slow their burn rate, and he in exchange tossed that time bomb on their homepage as a little f-you as he’s walking out the door? Who knows..
(they can thank their lucky stars that Yahoo is ignoring that tag - otherwise their site traffic would prob fall to zero.)(and I’m not even gonna go into the fact that they’re failing to use paid search to advertise when someone searches their name - gallerydirectart.com is eating their lunch there..)
This entry was posted on Friday, August 17th, 2007 at 10:27 am and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
