www.SFReader.com is a site for science fiction, fantasy and horror reviews. I make a little from click throughs to affiliates, about $10 a month. Anyway....
Was trying to drive more traffic, so I paid MarketLeap to register the homepage through Inktomi. Was getting about 400 average hits a month from them for three months (dec, jan, feb).
I wanted a more robust tracking program, so I tried out Metatraffic. Used the ASP include. Got it set up near the end of Feb and looking good. doing about 180 visitors a day from all sources. But....
Start getting failed crawl reports from MarketLeap. Went back and forth with their support and all they could tell me was that their bot keep getting 500 error. ????? No more hits coming from MarketLeap.
I got pretty fussy. "Worked last month!" I said. "Have you changed anything?" "No!" Uh...., hang on. Metatraffic. Hmmm.
I go to www.instantposition.com. They have a good page checker for SEO (free but you have to register). Ran a check on www.sfreader.com/indexsfr.asp (home page). The page checker can't find the tag or page content. I take out the #include track.asp. Finds the tag and content fine.
I leave the include out. Two days later Inktomi crawls my site no problem. Hits resume.
Summary: Potential for Metatraffic to interfere with search engine spiders to crawl your pages when using #include track.asp or the Server.Execute("track.asp").
Solution: I used #include track.htm instead of track.asp. No problem with instantposition checking my page and Inktomi still crawling fine. But the experience made me nervous enough that i stopped using metatraffic and went back to my old tracker.
I suggest you do some checking if you are using the #include track.asp or the Server.Execute("track.asp"). Both these methods seem to interfere with some search engine spiders' ability to crawl your page. Javascript methois seems OK, but still.... Could be costing you traffic!
www.SFReader.com
www.SFReader.com
Problems with Inktomi Bot and SEO Concern
Strange.
I tested one of my pages with instantposition.com with and got the same result as you.
I removed the Server.Execute("track.asp") snippet from the page and tested it again - there was no change! - it still can't find the tag or page content.
I don't beleive this is a MetaTraffic issue - it's the same with all my .asp pages!
Mark Voss
[url="http://sbwhosting.com/"]SBW Hosting[/url] [url="http://small-business-websites.co.uk/"]Small Business Websites[/url] [url="http://fastsnail.co.uk/"]FastSnail[/url]
Problems with Inktomi Bot and SEO Concern
Hmmm.
Well for SFReader, it was definitely the Metatraffic, because when I used either the #include or Server.Execute, instantposition couldn't find the body tag. When I took them out, it found them no problem. I even tried it on more than one site and it was the same.
In any case, if the instantposition SEO Doctor can't find your body tag, that means some of the spiders out there might not be able to find it either. And that could be hurting your traffic!
SFReader
www.SFReader.com
www.SFReader.com
Problems with Inktomi Bot and SEO Concern
I still don't think it is just a MetaTraffic issue - I've tested over 50 pages now and all the .asp ones have the same result, even if they're using the javascript tracking method.
Has anyone else had this problem?
BTW most of my traffic comes through Google and the Googlebots don't have any problem finding my content.
Mark Voss
[url="http://sbwhosting.com/"]SBW Hosting[/url] [url="http://small-business-websites.co.uk/"]Small Business Websites[/url] [url="http://fastsnail.co.uk/"]FastSnail[/url]
Problems with Inktomi Bot and SEO Concern
I haven't heard of any issues with tracking / spiders. I check my weblogs for metasun.com and several other web sites that MetaTraffic is running on regularly and never see any 500 errors. Maybe you could check your web logs and find out what the specific error is?
Regards,
~Chad