Being an in-house SEO can be a very interesting and rewarding experience. You have a chance to build a single brand and focus all of your efforts on a site that you essentially own. When I came from the agency to work as an in-house SEO I was offered an opportunity to build an online presence from scratch. It has been extremely rewarding watching the site go from not being indexed to becoming well indexed and fairly well ranked in the SERPs. There are some things I did well but I did make one huge mistake and that is what I would like to discuss here.
The mistake I made gave me a big scare recently and it actually took me a while figure it out. The other day I noticed that my organic traffic seemed to drop a bit. Not a lot but it was enough for me to take a closer look. The first thing I did was check Webmaster Tools to see if there were any problems there. No errors showed up and all the diagnostics checked out. Next it was on to links and everything there seemed to be OK (checked in SiteExplorer too and everything there seemed to be on point). Next it was on to check how many pages were indexed. Yikes!!!! Yahoo showed a decrease of about 1/3 and Google showed that almost half of the pages that were indexed the day before were now gone. Most of the pages that were removed had fantastic content but they were fairly new so they did not have a lot of link juice yet. At first I thought that maybe it was a data center issue but as I researched further I realized that this was not the case. After some more research I discovered the problem. It seems that one of our test environments was made public and Google was filtering out the real site’s pages and indexing the test pages.
A little background on this test environment: We are owned by a larger company as an independent business. Our business recently changed offices while the larger company remained at our old space. Since our test servers were still at the old office we could not access them the same way. Out IT department created sub domains on the older domain and instead of password protecting them or blocking them with robots.txt they allowed them to be public. Well, Google found these pages residing within the older domain and filtered the real pages out and indexed the pages on the test server. I was frantic because while the pages did not deliver the bulk of our traffic they were high quality pages, they delivered some incremental traffic, and they have a potential to deliver some really good traffic when they start gaining more link juice.
Once I made the discovery at nine at night I called our CEO and emailed the web developer explaining what needed to be done and the importance of doing it ASAP. Everything has been straightened out now and I hope to see these pages back under our domains soon but the big lesson from this was that I missed an opportunity to educate everyone who can help or hurt how our site does in the SERPs. When I took on this job, I sat down and met with our CEO and the web developer to discuss how we should proceed and what I needed to do. I did not sit down with our IT manager and his staff to discuss what I needed from them. The IT department here has no knowledge of SEO or how search engines work and I did not meet with them to find this out. Hopefully this recent issue does not hurt us too badly, but it could have been avoided.
To avoid making the same mistake I did it is important for in house SEOs to make sure they meet regularly with everyone who is involved with their website. Explain what you will be doing and what you need from them. Update them regularly and make sure they let you know if they are going to make changes that may affect your work. When we moved to our new office I should have sat down and found out how everything was going to work and make sure everything we did was going to be SEO friendly. I did not and my efforts have suffered. When you are working with a company that is not knowledgeable about SEO you need to educate them as much as possible and make sure they keep you apprised about any changes that may interfere with your work. It can be something as simple as adding a robots.txt or simply making sure that your test pages are not accessible by the search engines. Those small mistakes can seriously hinder your efforts and make your job more difficult.
Communicate with everyone and assume nobody knows anything about SEO. It’s better to do that and get it right the first time than it is to have to go back and fix mistakes. I made the mistake of not talking to everyone and keeping in touch and am now paying the price. Don’t make the same mistakes I did.
