SEOing

This morning I updated my photo website with the files I modified yesterday, then checked it was all working okay.

I had a very weird problem where a page that I had updated was still loading the old version, even after refreshing the page. I downloaded the file from the server to check it had been updated, and it had. I then tried the page in Opera (previously I was using Google Chrome), and the updated page loaded okay.

So I started up Fiddler to check that Chrome was requesting the page from the server when I refreshed it, but now when I refreshed the page Chrome did request the page and did load the updated page. It's like Chrome was trying to annoy me by loading from cache but realised that I was watching it when I started up Fiddler and so decided to load the page from the server like it should.

After getting the site working okay I tried out the IIS SEO Toolkit on the local copy of my site. The first time I ran it, it downloaded 2 pages though. It seems that it doesn't work properly if you specify to consider links as internal from the main domain and subdomains.

It did find a quite a few true errors with my site, but mostly it found thousands of incorrect errors:
The description is missing (on 301s, 302s with Location, and 404s)
The <h1> tag is missing (on 301s, 302s with Location, and 404s)
The title is missing (on 301s, and 302s with Location)
The page contains multiple canonical formats (on one 301, 302s with Location, and 404s)
The page contains broken hyperlinks (on 301s, 302s with Location, links to )
An unexpected Error has occurred (on XML files larger than 100kB)
The link Text is not relevant (for links that contain a title attribute with relevant text)
The page contains too many hyperlinks (on the xml sitemap files!)

It is possible to filter results to show only pages with a 200 HTTP status code and without an <h1>, for example, but it would be more sensible if it already ignored things missing from pages that are automatically redirected.

In the evening I watched an episode of Star Trek DS9 with Mauser and Bo and did some online Christmas shopping.