Two-part business site SEO

Well, the changes to Bell Leisure's site seem to have helped a great deal with their Google listings. The site is now split into two sub-domains, one for swimming pools and one for the snooker and pool tables half of their business.

This has also made it possible to list the two almost-separate businesses as separate items in Google's Local Business Centre. This means that Bell Leisure appears nicely for relevant searches for either part of their business.

However, even with the subdomains being listed separately, Google was still returning the "top level" page for searches. I've now moved the descriptive text from this page, and into the two sub-domains, in an attempt to make the subdomain home pages be listed first.

We'll see what happens!

Spamhaus bullies

Yesterday Spamhaus decided to block a whole 254 address range of IP addresses, owned by Netrino who host my server, because they didn't consider that Netrino had taken suitable action against a spammer.

Today they have relented a little, and only a 16 address range is now being blocked. So e-mail from hundreds of innocent businesses is now able to flow a little better again.

It would have been nice if Spamhaus had done a little more homework before blocking such a large range of addresses. The addresses clearly come from a server hosting company, with only a few IPs allocated to each of their customers.

At least it has prompted me to find out how to relay outbound e-mail via my other server, hosted by Clustered.net. This worked fine while it was needed, and I've updated all my customers' SPF records to allow either server to send out mail for their domains. MailScanner's watermarking also proved useful in this situation, as each message only needed to be scanned by one of the servers.

So while Spamhaus' bullying action certainly annoyed, it has resulted in a little more resilience against potential spam blacklisting for Fonant e-mail services if this sort of thing ever happens again.

Thanks Spamhaus!