Sphinn - Sometimes Fixing a Site Means Breaking It First

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Sometimes Fixing a Site Means Breaking It First

Went Hot: March 7, 2008 - 12:30 pm
Posted By: DavidWallace 220 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.searchengineguide.com)
Category: SEO

Stoney deGeyter writes, "It would be great if every time a change was made to a site that the result was positive. Unfortunately, that's not the real world. Sometimes in SEO you make a change hoping to help, but it ends up hurting. What worked somewhere else won't necessarily work everywhere."

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from Halfdeck 220 days ago #

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People are always looking for quick fixes, and "fixing a site" often is more a distraction than anything else. If you have $2000 to spend on switching from Capitalized urls to all lower case, I'd invest that money in PPC instead and make $40,000. But for one reason or another, clients are more attracted to SEO voodoo that leads nowhere than real marketing.

from St0n3y 220 days ago #

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Halfdeck, I agree. There are so many things not to be concerned about. One client was worried that the word "store" appeard in their URL pushing pages into a sub-directory. Someone gave them bad advice and I couldn't convince them NOT to "fix" it. But there are still things that absolutely do require getting in there and mucking things up a bit.

from g1smd 220 days ago #

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I doubt anyone would pay 2000 just to have their URLs changed to lower case. However, a case in point, is one of the sites I am working on at the moment. There are more than 70 general things wrong with it, one of which is that the mixed case URLs mean that every page of content
can be indexed under at least 6 different URLs. In fixing the URLs all to lower case, many other domain and URL canonicalisation issues on the site can also be more easily tackled.
These fixes are for the long term. After a decade of SEO neglect and non-implementation, sales are now rising for the first time in at least several years. The payback from this work will carry on for many years in the future.

from g1smd 220 days ago #

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**** a content management system. This, of course, will cause all new URLs to be created ***

Not necessarily. There are many ways to retain the old URLs and connect them to a new internal file structure.

ModRewrite is your friend.

*** Similarly, a site moving from standard HTML to a php framework, may also find that URLs will have to change. ***

It 'may' do, but it doesn't have to.

The AddType directive may be your friend. Failing that, look at URL rewriting.

from St0n3y 219 days ago #

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q1smd, I agree and I was just using these as general examples without getting burdened by too many specifics. We were working on implementing redirects and figuring out what worked with the system we had to work with.

from Halfdeck 219 days ago #

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"In fixing the URLs all to lower case, many other domain and URL canonicalisation issues on the site can also be more easily tackled. "

Obviously, but as long as no one is linking to those URLs, its not a top priority issue. This particular client is refusing to free himself from a web dev team that charges $100/hour - even installing a Wordpress blog costs him 100 bucks. He also refuses to build any useful content, instead relying on reciprocal link networks, directory submission, and other low-bar-to-entry tactics to push his template site up the rankings.

Of course, technical stuff is worth investing time into, but if you're working with a piece-of-crap site, first make it into to something valuable and original - no META ROBOTS tweaks are gonna save you.

from g1smd 219 days ago #

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I see your point, but I wouldn't want to add more content that immediately gets indexed under
multiple URLs, for example. I would want to fix the site structure before adding any new content.

It's important to draw up a list of things that could be done, things that can be done, things that should be done, and then prioritise them; especially noting items that block something else.

from Halfdeck 219 days ago #

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"I see your point, but I wouldn't want to add more content that immediately gets indexed under
multiple URLs, for example. I would want to fix the site structure before adding any new content."

Agreed, but I'm talking about websites that, on the whole, aren't broke. site: command returns the right set of URLs. No dupe content issues. Relatively clean URLs. When I first take a look at a clients site, sure, I recommend fixing structural issues, but after a months long SEO campaign, there's a point where I say enough is enough, and move on beyond technical fixes to something more substantial.

When a client refuses to create compelling content and keeps digging around for that one SEO silver bullet that solves all hir problems because SEO voodoo like internal nofollow is quicker and cheaper to implement than creating valuable content, then I have a problem in my hands, especially if I'm dealing with an e-commerce site that looks just like hundreds of other sites out there and I have to bribe my way to get every single backlink.