“Homepage Home Page
Hello! We’re currently working hard on a few improvements.

We know know that you’re really keen to have a look around our shiny new website (we love shiny new things too), so check back in a little while. We think it’ll be worth the wait.

If you need to contact the ireland.com team, then you can email us at info@digitalworx.ie

If, on the other hand, you’re after The Irish Times, they’ve moved. You can now visit them at www.irishtimes.com”

Can’t be good for SEO either, taking a production instance down in such an old yellow hat busy at work under construction way?

Hi Paul – the archive.org cache can be very useful for picking issues from the past. I’ve seen it used to find sites that previously sold links and the like. Google will often point you to the archive of a page, although we all know that they have a much more powerful archive at their disposal.

Thanks to both for commenting
Richard

Weird thing is I don’t honestly know why I do these posts. I’m just so conditioned to look at websites from an SEO perspective now. Thankfully I don’t really have any need to pitch for work (x’s fingers that doesn’t put the mockers on me now). And I suppose in a way I am being somewhat patronising when I highlight some failings, but I hope that some of what I write might actually be useful to those sites I write about (in the main that is).

Rgds
Richard

At the start I thought the same thing, but I know Richard and is not like him, looking for a job this way…

Good analysis Richard. I looked at their robots.txt, and it needs to be updated, 1/2 the pages on it don’t exist anymore. I couldn’t find an XML sitemap at any of the usual locations either. It is funny to such large sites with the canonical URL problem not fixed too.

Paul

My tone is my tone. If you read my other posts you’ll see that’s just how I write.

I’m not pitching for any job – I often write about large well-funded sites because I have high expectations given the budgets involved.

Thanks for commenting
Richard

Paul