Although my first look at WolframAlpha was rather disappointing I didn’t really intend to show everything that’s not working as I had expected. However I stumbled upon problem after problem.

Now I didn’t intend to write this article at all but just searching for what Google has already indexed of WolframAlpha and following some links made it clear that they obviously didn’t think about SEO at all prior to launching their site.

The problem is: they are doing many things that  might actually harm their Google rankings that are just beginning to show up. We don’t yet know who will be using WolframAlpha in two months, if it will grow to become something that most of the people will use  just like Google or if it is going to fail like WikiaSearch.

Remember: they received over 1000 links to their site within two days and this is likely to grow so it makes sense to optimize the site now to prevent damage.

So from a logical point of view if I had been responsible for the WolframAlpha website I would not have done any of the following that WolframAlpha has implemented:

• You Should Prevent No-Result Pages From Being Indexed
  “no result” pages return an 200 HTTP status code, not a 404 - Google will likely index these pages. The page doesn’t contain any META robots tag containing “noindex,follow” either.
  Because the differences between different “no result” pages depending on the query are only marginal this might be seen as duplicate content which you should never have on your own site.
• Don’t Use Redirects For Loadbalacing
  Using the search field on the homepage now redirects via a 302 redirect to a hostname like “www18.wolframalpha.com” leading to even more duplicate content if Google indexes the same page with two different hostnames, e.g. www18 and www76. Normally you would be using a loadbalancer and not use HTTP redirects to distribute the load. They should at least be using the canonical tag to tell Google the original URL, but they aren’t, regretfully.
• Use A Robots.txt File
  WolframAlpha is currently not using a robots.txt file so they are not telling search engines what should not be indexed.
  
• Optimize The Clickthrough Rate In The SERPS
  The result pages do not contain a META description field which I would recommend for a higher click-through rate in the organic search results.
• Use Text To Display Text, Not Images
  The title tag could also be optimized but I still don’t understand why even simple text is rendered as an image.

What do you think?

Tags: google, seo, wolframalpha

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 17th, 2009 at 2:27 pm and is filed under SEO, Search Engines. 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.