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dazc

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I used to work in construction in a previous life and always said I could judge how good a tradesman is simply by their appearance. The same goes for their website. If they have pride in their work it will show; if they do just about enough to get paid it will also show.

Doesn't have to be just larger sites. If someone launched their basic website 5 years before you did it's going to be difficult to outrank them.

Most people are indeed. Many of these people will also be able to complete very difficult tasks that you can't.

Recently explained to a local service business owner that all she needed to do was get listed on Google maps and start asking customers for reviews. Literally showed her how competing businesses were top of the search results by doing just this.

Did she do it? No.

People like this are never going to get around to having a website, let alone actually maintain and promote it.

Very much location dependent though. I lived less than a mile from Southampton city centre for a while and could never get anything close to dial-up standard download/upload speeds. I've heard similar from London residents.

I've witnessed a few catastrophes that have resulted in mistakes made via robots.txt, especially when using 'disallow' as an attempt to prevent pages being indexed.

I don't know if the claims made here are true but there really isn't any reason not to have a valid robots.txt available. One could argue that if you want Google to respect robots.txt then not having one should result in Googlebot not crawling any further.

If I'm buying shoes that were made in the third world for minimal cost then branding is not a guarantee of quality that it once was. This has been the case for at least the past ten years but it goes to show that if you have a well-known brand you can keep milking it for a long time before the market turns against you.

Breaking News: Google de-indexes random sites all of the time and there is often no obvious reason why. They also penalize sites in a way where pages are indexed but so deep-down that no one will ever find them. Again, there is often no obvious reason.