Website Errors

Opportunity is the focus of website development and identifying errors is part of this. Technical faults are a barrier to progress, with many sites eliminating a percentage of their visitors by accident, along with restricting search engines.

• As the image above suggests, search robots have issues obtaining data from non standard sites. They have improved but an all flash site for example is unlikely to help them, or disabled visitors, or those using popular mobile devices. Accessible content is a primary need.
• Ease of access extends to website navigation, no point having an otherwise reasonable site with navigation in flash or javascript. A proportion of visitors can't move around and search engines may fail to understand the site.
• Regardless of format, disfunctional navigation stops people and search engines seeing what you offer. There may be reasons to channel visitors but try to make core options available on each page, along with an easy to follow sitemap.
• A slow website will deter visitors, around 15% physically lose their temper with slow pages and far more never become customers. Neither do search engines have limitless resources or patience, they are also now factoring site performance into their ranking algorithms.

There are other common flaws in design, although often site specific. Beyond making your website accessible and responsive, try to avoid the technical errors below.

Common Website Mistakes

• Most blog or content management systems have an option to block search engines. A meta tag such as will show in the head section of the source code, or the robots.txt file be set to disallow. A way (not the best way) to prevent access while you build the site but failing to change this stops your website being indexed, unfortunate people have waited for months wondering why.
• Your server also needs to allow robot access and be functional. Even intermittent downtime can lose visitors and search position. Check robot access regularly using the Fetch as Googlebot facility mentioned on our search engine tools page. Do the same for standard browser access, going to the site as a visitor would.
• Valid code is not essential but there's a problem with that. A page can get away with errors yet be invisible to an odd browser or robot because of one error. If you identify a hitch , this is harder to solve if you have to work through many. Neither may you be aware if all browsers, or search robots are less happy than they might be. Make the effort and keep code reasonably valid.
• Do not write content for search engines, they don't buy anything and are no longer interested in that approach. The same applies to spending hours filling out meta tags, such as the keywords tag which is completely ignored by leading search engines. Robots are helped by content but largely in the way people are. The best you are likely to achieve by playing to them is to be ignored.
• Duplicate content is the enemy of search positioning and not ideal for visitors. Avoid the temptation to use content from elsewhere, or duplication on your own site. Where that is unavoidable for technical or visitor requirements, make sure you take duplicates out of the search equation.
• The most common error with content is a lack of this. Not everyone wants to read long articles and your site may be the type that needs to get to the point but compromise. Sites with minimal content may not be trusted, don't get people involved and serve little purpose for search engines. Neither does static content, a steady flow of new additions is part of maintaining a website.
• Most gimmicks do not work, neither do poor spelling or grammar. If a website is representing your business, this needs to be as tidy, trustworthy and communicative as you would be if you were visiting a client.
• Inbound links are valuable for traffic and search. Even so, spending vast amounts of time on this is not good use of time. Links from irrelevant sites, directories, blog comments do not bring much traffic, or help much in search. A few good quality links to content on your own site are more use and that content serves your customers.

Avoiding Core Errors

As simple as this sounds, the best ways to avoid mistakes is think of your users. Look at technical requirements but many aspects mentioned above would not appear in a website built from a visitor's perspective. Search engines will be equally happy as they want to satisfy their users, who are your visitors.

We consider both search engines and visitors in our website reports, as the best way to serve a business. If we can help in any way, please get in touch.