How Your Firewall Can Destroy Your Search Engine
Rankings
Some webmasters recently experienced a delisting from the search engines
without any good reason. The webmasters had not done anything wrong and
their web sites were optimized for search engines. Nevertheless, the web
sites had been removed from search engines.
Poorly configured firewalls can block search engine spiders.
|
|
It turned out that the delisted web sites were all hosted by the same
hosting company. More precisely, the web sites were all hosted by a hosting
company that used a special firewall software by SonicWALL Inc.
That firewall stopped the search engine spiders from accessing their web
sites. Google, Yahoo, MSN and all other search engines that request the
robots.txt file couldn't index the web site anymore because the firewall
didn't allow that:
"An attacker could retrieve robots.txt from the server, then use the
contents of this file to discover the path of an unprotected administration
interface for the server. The attacker may gain control of the webserver
using this interface.
The information gathered from robots.txt could be used for system compromise
and control of the web server." (source)
This is the standard security settings of the SonicWALL firewall and it
basically means that your web site won't be spidered by search engines if
you use this firewall without customizing it.
A firewall with these settings will drop the connection to anyone requesting
the robots.txt file so that it looks as if the web site is offline. From an
SEO point of view, this is very bad for your web site because all good
search engine spiders request the robots.txt file before indexing your web
site.
What does this mean to you?
If your web site is not listed on search engines although it has many good
incoming links and optimized web page content, you should ask your web host
if their firewall blocks search engines that request the robots.txt file.
Your web host might not be aware of the problem.
|
|
|
|
| |
