Web Wide Way

SEO: Redirect Error Causing Traffic Issues

August 27, 2009

Google has been a supporter of using a redirect for anyone who needs to change their site location or at least a page location. Google has been known as the expert on redirects. Unfortunately, in a recent discovery it has been determined they have cost numerous users traffic for their sites in one particular area.
Google Blogger has been costing sites their traffic. Google Blogger is like Word Press, a blogging tool to create domains and blogs for your site. It was discovered that the site had a redirect bug which cost numerous sites traffic when creating a new domain. It was redirecting the users to the old blog hosted on Google Blogger Subdomain.
Even Google was experiencing issues with this problem. The bug did begin on the Blogger system, and it will show different results depending on the browser you are using. For example with Safari 4 or Firefox 3 users were seeing a notice about being redirected. This redirect was saying that the blog has not been checked for spam, viruses, or other malware thus giving the user the option of going forward or not.
Anytime a person sees this when heading to a blog or a site they are not going to want to proceed. It is not possible to really calculate how much traffic has been lost, but it is astounding to think about it. Internet Explorer 7 users didn’t even get the warning. They would just see an error page that the browser couldn’t display the page. Google is coming under fire for such a mix up, and they are seeking a way to fix it. For now though the problem still exists. For search engine optimisation purposes it is imperative that you always check your blogs each week by going in how the user would to find you just to make sure you are working and not losing traffic.

Entry Filed under: Search Engines. .