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My blog post last Friday seems to have opened up a whole can of worms - problems with NetBenefit hosting had led to duplicate content problems for many websites!

To bring new readers up to speed, a client of mine in the Security Identification industry asked us to promote them in the search engines for the keyword wristbands. During a casual check last Friday I typed the word into Google and saw that they were in the top 10 for the word. At first I was over the moon, (there are over three million competing pages in Google), until I noticed that the url being displayed was web4097.vs.netbenefit.co.uk/wristbands.html not myclient.com/wristbands.html.

To evaluate the effect this would have at Google, first I copied a random sentence from the page into Google as an exact phrase and to my dismay G returned one result, the NetBenefit virtual server address - it was not my client’s url.

Realising this was going to be a major problem - a virtual hosting set-up or DNS issue, I contacted a good friend who has great technical knowledge and experience in this field, Dave Naylor. I asked if this was going to be a big problem and his reply was “f*ck hell yes” It was as I expected and indeed said in my blog - a duplicate content issue - and not just for my client’s specific keyphrase, thousands of other NetBenefit sites had the same hosting problem.

Not being one to sit around on my arse when the you-know-what hits the fan, we arranged new hosting away from the NetBenefit servers and pointed the name at the new servers - at least the problem would not spread to other pages of my client’s site.

After much tooing and froing late that afternoon we had sorted the site’s new home and were just waiting for the new details to propagate across the web - I was tired and ready to wind down for the evening when the phone rang and a gentleman asked to speak to Peter, “That’s me” I replied and the fellow went on to explain that he was with NetBenefit and was anxious to contact David. Now Dave moved house recently and I didn’t know his new number, so I gave this chap the company number for Dave, just in case anyone was working late (they’re a dedicated bunch over there at Dave’s company) - I didn’t hear any more

I suspect this story will not go away anytime soon - and my client is not a happy bunny, seeing his prized top ten position attributed to a different url as a result of NetBenefit hosting problems.�

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 8th, 2007 at 5:50 pm and is filed under Search Engine Optimisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.