1-800-Flowers’ Web Tweak Accidentally Grows Thorns
Written by Evan SchumanThe move itself certainly made sense. The retailer tried moving non-customer traffic—such as search engine bots and agents trying to track a variety of Web performance elements—to some slightly slower servers, with the intent of making the experience much faster for paying customers. And if a bot for Bing, Yahoo or Google get its data a little bit more slowly, no harm done. That was the theory. But slowing down performance for a Google spider, for instance, will in turn cause Google to assume your site is slower and that could impact a retailer's ranking on the search giant. It also caused some companies that track—and report publicly—Web performance to see the retailer's Web presence as slow or, in this case, down completely.
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I have strong reservations about the 'individual' certification and posting of that information for merchants. Can you imagine the potential employee poaching that might occur? The implications when competitors can look up how many are certified with each of their competitors? 
-Christine
