I had an interesting experience recently when Google Webmasters Tools failed site’s verification.

So what’s new you ask ?

On further investigation the website’s sitemap and robots.txt had disappeared too.  Arrghh ! Then when I tried to FTP into the site and this failed as well I new something was really amiss.

The long and short of it is that the client’s IT guy decided that the site should be moved to another web host… The tool he used to migrate the website must have assumed that websites only consist of html & jpg files and didn’t copy the sitemap, the webmaster authentication files, and robots.txt

I must admit that a webmaster verification file may look a lot like a corrupted file name in the heat of the moment so I’d be wary about it too if I didn’t know what it was about.

Next time GoogleBot visited the site it couldn’t find the sitemap registered for the domain and threw up an error. In the meantime Google Webmasters Tool was baying about site verification.

Its not the first time my work has been mangled by over-enthusiastic web developers &/or IT guys, but I have to confess to being pretty low key about it all

There was no permanent damage in this case, and on reflection the sitemap etc would have needed to be missing for quite some time before was some rnkaing ramifications.

I guess the lesson is that websites ARE becoming more sophisticated environments and there are several parties who should be consulted before adhoc changes are undertaken…

The other lesson here is to not assume.

As they say, to ASSUME is to make an ASS out of U and ME.

One of the dark consequences of a successfully ranking website appears to be that it not only attracts the attention of prospective clients but also exposes the website to spammers as well.

In our experience business sites previously untroubled by spam, find themselves receiving unwanted Spam attention after receiving a dose of SEM.

Before you leap into the fray with that accusational tone – no we haven’t listed the sites in spammy directories or undertaken anything remotely blackhat, grotesque or underhanded.

The sites in question have had some SEO tweaking; been registered with Google, Yahoo and Live’s WebMasters Tools or equivalent and are now running an AdWords paid search campaign.

Suddenly they become spamming targets.  I guess it does force the Webmaster to take steps to prevent email addresses from being harvested off the site…

If you’ve got a thought on why this may be the case I’d love to hear from you.