Small mistake that killed your SEO efforts?
Our client added a hyperlink to a Keyword Phrase which was bringing them a lot of organic traffic. The link was to a new generic product comparison page.
-- Google crawled the page the next day and indexed it.
-- Traffic dropped 90% after that change.
I would like to compile a list of small - yet important SEO techniques which could kill your efforts. We will convert to Flash and share it with the SEO community.
Please share your experience and provide realtime examples.
Answers (12)
Simon H
Visibility Extremist and Social Media Campaign Manager
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Hi Sandeep
The usual one is through rushing, I've seen many spell words incorrectly they are paying for in google. It is so obvious but so easily done. It is the same on questions on here.... I regularly find things for people no one else can due to spelling errors.
Simon Hamer ~~~~~ Visibility Extremist ~~~~~~
Hi Sandeep,
Good thought to bring up such list, I had a situation when one of our client's organic traffic dropped to 60% and when we analyzed the reason we found that he had done content changes to the site including renaming of URLs. He changed the old URLs that had good PR without our knowledge. When Google indexed the new URLs the rankings disappeared from SERPs.
The rest of the story is anybody's guess:)
Janaki
Links:
Teresa S
Head of International Marketing
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Hi Sandeep,
I would have to say that our small mistake would have to had been relying solely on a keyword analysis tool to determine keywords to target - without viewing which keywords were already bringing traffic to the site through PPC and through organic SEO already. Through changing the keywords in which we targeted (based on analysis), one of our sites SEO traffic halved as a result. I have learnt a very important lesson on using various techniques and information to define a definative list of keywords.
Hope this helps.
Teresa
Here are several small mistakes made often in business with regards to SEO:
1) No baseline for their SEO campaign -- how do you measure results?
2) Web Dev team doesn't believe in Web Development or SEO Best Practices, therefore their code virtually handcuffs you from doing anything SEO other than writing Titles, Descriptions and adding Keywords
3) URLs are underscored instead of hyphenated
4) Aren't using their PPC campaigns in conjunction with their SEO campaigns
5) Paying for backlinks to their site or linking to bad neighborhoods
6) No sitemaps file or site index on their website - small SEO mistakes with huge impact
7) 302 redirects -- for some reason, companies do not think changing/re-naming pages are important to SEO
8) Having to wait 2-3 months for SEO recommendations to be implemented because Web Dev team is backed up with requests (most often found in Fortune 500 companies)
9) Hyperlinks on their site with the phrase "Click Here" -- yes, there are plenty of those.
10) Site surprises you -- when you look at analytics and see none of the keywords they are optimizing for are what they are being found for in the search engines (this can happen if it is a new SEO account or if the last SEO person was clueless)
Hope this helps!
Simple ones:
Updating content regularly.
Portability of content.
Participating within the online community, both as a consumer and a user.
on more than one occasion i've seen a well-intentioned misuse of the robot exclusion standard wipe one of the top 200 domains on the web completely out of google, yahoo, etc.
the default behavior of web search engines is to crawl your website and add it to their index, you don't need to configure anything for this to happen. you don't need robot meta tags or /robots.txt to get your content IN to a web search engine. similary, malicious bots and crawlers do not honor to these robot exclusion instructions at all - the robot exclusion standards are useless as a security mechanism against rogue crawlers.
so in the "small mistake that killed your SEO efforts" category, we have well-meaning programmers who get discover the robot exclusion standard and install an unnececssary /robots.txt file on the site with a typo or incorrect syntax that basically tells all of the major web search engines "please keep out":
user-agent: *
disallow: /
^ completely canceling months or years of SEO effort in one fell swoop, and killing them indefinitely until your QA process brings it to light, or worse, until you notice the drop-off in search-referred traffic.
Links:
Biggest mistake is not having a system in place for when the business picks up, capturing contact information, phone calls etc.....
The biggest mistake that I have seen so far is outsourcing only specific aspects of search engine optimization, like link building, to an outside firm which does not have the necessary guidelines to support, with consistency, the overall search engine optimization strategy for the site.
My comments-
- Don't make on-page changes frequently on pages which are ranking in search engines.
- For link building-
- Keep variation in Metas (title, description).
- Always link building onto relevant sites.
Thanks.
Can you clarify "added a hyperlink to a Keyword Phrase"? From what I understand about internal links - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/10/importance-of-link-architecture.html - its generally a good thing. What exactly did your client do to get google slapped?
Links:
Clarification added 9 months ago:
Oops here's the clickable link to the post.
Maurice W
Senior SEO THUK Media
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I rember one (now ex client) who tried to do redirecting to search engine friendly urls temselves and blocked all .php pages from google :-)
Jay L
Co-Founder, Managing Partner at BMFAgency, LLC - Corporate Communications Management Company
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"Session IDs" are a spider killer. Don't let the programmers use them.
example: ?PHPSESSID=
