Happy Halloween mozzerati! Oh, Roger wants me to tell you: “Trick or treat!” Actually, this week we’ve got a lot more treats than tricks for you. Our treats will even help you overcome some of the nasty trixes of the SEO world! Jen Lopez, our Community Manager at SEOmoz, is here to tell you about some of the scary SEO mishaps that could happen to you if you’re not careful. You’re going to want to watch this one all the way through; I hear there’s a wiked Halloween mozzter mash at the end! Roger may even go trick or treating after the credits…
Today we’re going to do something a little fun. We’re going to talk about making sure to not let these scary SEO mishaps happen to you. Some of you may have noticed I actually sent a Tweet out last night asking for everyone to let me know some of the scariest things that have happened to their site. These are really the top three things that people talked about and things that I have personally seen both here at SEOmoz and at previous jobs.
The first one is to fear the agony of sitewide de-indexing. [eerie wail in background] This can happen a number of different ways. A rogue developer or a developer that doesn’t understand what a major impact something can make. It could be a host. It could be a number of different things, but there are various ways to do this.
The first one is robots in the robots.txt disallowing all. I’ve also seen this where we did major rewrites of a ton of URLs, a bunch of redirects, and the developer thought, “Oh, well, since we’re redirecting these URLs, we should disallow all of these thousands and thousands of pages from the robots.txt because we don’t want them crawled anymore.’ It essentially completely killed weeks and weeks’ worth of 301 redirects because all those pages were poof, no longer being served in the index.
The next one is canonicalize all pages to the home page. Last week, Dr. Pete did a great post, a very scary post, about how he added the rel=canonical tag to every page on his home page and it always redirected them all back to the home page. I’ll let you take a look, but it was essentially catastrophic. He was lucky enough to get some of the pages back, and he wrote a very funny reinclusion request. But I don’t think most people would have gotten the same results. So, don’t do that.
The next thing is adding the no index tag to every page. I’ve seen this happen. Sometimes a developer goes in and they want to set it up so that the no index tag shows up on certain pages, paginated pages for example. But the code that they wrote isn’t quite right, and actually the no index tag is showing up on every page. I specifically had this happen. It took about two weeks for all of the pages to be de-indexed and for the hair to start coming out, people are freaking out, running around, where are all of my pages, to find out that one simple little tag at the top of the page on every page removed all the pages from the index.
So just be sure to watch those three things. Sometimes it is not always you who is updating it. Like I said, it’s a developer, it’s a development team, it’s something else. Just be sure to watch it. Make sure that you are going through and checking those out now and then.
The next one is, don’t let your CMS kill your rankings. [sinister laugh in background] That’s scary. There are a number of things that your CMS (content management system) can do to your site that will actually kill your rankings. We’ve seen this several times. I worked on a site once where it was builtin.net and we used something called DotNetNuke, maybe many of you have used this before, and it created tons of duplicate content. Every single page on the site had at least three URLs that you could get to. You had to use plug-ins and various things in order to do redirects and that sort of thing. It was very, very difficult to set up.
The other one are theme or design issues. Michelle Robbins actually sent me a message today and said, “Okay, I have a doozy here. It’s much more than 140 characters.” She sent me a message about a friend of hers who went through a site redesign. They set her up in WordPress. They picked a great theme and did some modifications to it, redesigned it and all this stuff. The site goes up, and two or three weeks later they are wondering, “Why aren’t any of our pages indexed? I don’t even rank for the actual site name. What in the heck is going on?” They realized that the theme that they had chosen didn’t allow title tags on the page. She also had a number of widgets and various things so the internal linking was broken. Essentially, it was the theme that killed her website. She had to go in and do a bunch of modifications. So just make sure that when you pick that amazing theme for your website that it is not hurting your ranking.
Another big issue is, oftentimes, if you have a big huge CMS sometimes maybe a homegrown one that’s five, six, ten years old, it doesn’t allow for 301 redirects or even easily set up the canonical tag. Just be sure, be aware of some of those things when you’re setting up your CMS, you’re changing to a new one, whatever the case may be.
The third one, the third one is really horrible. Beware of those gruesome backlinks. [eerie roar in background] Yikes, that one gave me shivers. Watch out. These are some black cat, really scary tactics. But I actually had several people come to me and say that they’ve seen this happen, which for the life of me I can’t imagine doing, but, you know, there are people out there. So watch out for competitors, revengeful employees, bad agencies, whatever the case may be. They can go out and whether it’s hijack your backlinks, they buy a bunch of spammy backlinks from bad neighborhoods and whatnot, and all of a sudden your pages are getting de- indexed. You’re noticing you have a penalty, you have no idea why. You think everything is happy and chipper. And then you go to Open Site explorer, put in your site, and you see all these ridiculous links. Another tactic people can take is to sort of brand-jack you, right. Okay, that sounded really bad. But I think you know what I mean. They go in and they start ranking for your name in those tops SERPs.
I know that is a completely separate topic but it is rather scary. It’s just something that when you are, we all obsess over rankings, so every day you’re checking your analytics, you’re checking to see if your rankings are still in place, you’re checking on all these things, but don’t forget these three things. Don’t forget that these can happen and don’t forget to double check. Maybe it is a weekly or a monthly process of going in and having a checklist of, “Let’s make sure that these nasty things aren’t happening to me.” You’ll be on your merry way.
I hope everyone has a great Halloween. As you can see, Roger over here is going trick-or-treating. Here at the SEOmoz office, we are having a big Halloween party today. I hope you guys have an absolutely great weekend. Next week, I promise, Rand or Danny, the really cool guys, they’ll be back. See you next week. Bye.
[Awesome dance party] [Roger Trick-or-Treating]Boo!
If you have any tricks or treats that you’ve learned along the way, we’d love to hear about it in the comments below. Post your comment and be heard! Happy Halloween!
