- Basement Cat is watching your SEO
With Halloween just around the corner, I thought it would be appropriate to share a few horror stories that I’ve either heard or personally experienced with everyone. Don’t worry, though. They aren’t about ghosts or the scary thing under your bed. I’m referring to horror stories that can happen to your site while setting it up for SEO purposes.
Trust me. Some of these stories are pretty scary and you definitely don’t want them to happen to you. Still, they do happen from time to time and the best way to avoid them is to learn from their mistake. So steel yourself for some horrifying tales from the SEO crypt of terror and hope that you never have to experience them for yourself:
- The no index tag gobbling up all your pages – Sometimes when a developer wants to remove a couple of pages off the crawled site index, that person sometimes gets carried away and ends up nuking the entire site. What was supposed to be just a few pages tagged as a “no crawl” zone for bots became a site-wide disaster where a site is completely wiped off the face of the SERPs. That’s why it’s very important to watch where this deadly little tag is placed and make sure that it doesn’t spill over to the other more important pages.
- Using the rel=canonical tag to always point to your home page – This is another story of careless tag misuse where SEO expert Dr. Pete tried experimenting with this tag instead of the usual 301 redirect to see its effect on his site. He tried adding this tag on all of his pages to point back to the site’s home page. Sufficed to say, the results were disastrous. Apart from having his entire site practically de-indexed, there was a major drop in his traffic and it took him weeks to recover everything. In the end, he advised everyone to be careful of where you code in your tags. One misplaced tag can end up destroying everything that you’ve built, so always be aware of where and how to use it properly.
- Choose your CMS wisely – While a lot of CMSs claim to be easy to use and user-friendly, some can easily lure you in with this catch phrase and then give you a heck of a time optimizing your site once you have it installed. It can sometimes happen that there are a lot of duplicate content that gets generated after you build your site. There are even cases where old school CMSs don’t easily allow the use of 301 redirects or the canonical tag, unless you download certain plugins or use specific workarounds. It pays to know what a CMS can or cannot do before deciding to install or switch to it.
- Do you trust your WordPress theme? – Similar to choosing your CMS wisely, it also pays to check capabilities of a theme that you plan on using for your WordPress site. I once heard a story about someone who underwent a site redesign and chose a brand new theme to use for her site. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that she realized that her site wasn’t being indexed properly. This was because the theme didn’t allow title tags on the page, so the crawlers were having a hard time indexing the site properly. This goes to show that no matter how pretty your theme is, if it ends up messing up your site in the process then it’s not worth using it.
- Beware the backstabbing backlinks – My final horror story is perhaps the scariest of all since it can be instigated by someone outside of your business. As much as backlinks can lend some invaluable link juice to your site, it can also get you in trouble if any malicious competitors decide to hijack them. It’s also possible for them to get a bunch of low quality links and have them point back to your site, which can possible rank you down as a consequence. This is why it’s important to check up on your backlinks every now and again to see if you have any ridiculous links that can drag you down.
I hope I haven’t totally scared anyone away with these horror stories. Like I mentioned earlier though, we can learn a lot from listening to stories like these so that we know exactly what to avoid should we find ourselves in a similar situation.
In any case, if you have any similar SEO horror stories, please feel free to post them in the comments section below and give everyone a hair raising time reading them.
Later,
Andy “The Horror Boss” Jenkins
