Like this article? PLEASE +1 it! Evan Signature
Evan Carmichael Top Header
Share for a Cause









Planning for Web Site Disaster

Written by: Kalena Jordan

Article Overview: Do you have a corporate site where the content is written by various in-house staff members, the pages are managed by your freelance web designer and your SEO campaigns are outsourced? Read on to put in place plans to prevent web site disaster.

Free Download - Top 10 Dumbest Web Site Decisions By Kalena Jordan
Name: Email:

Planning for Web Site Disaster

When you have a business web site that multiple people work on, one of the most difficult tasks is to manage and allocate responsibilities. For example, you might have a corporate site where the content is written by various in-house staff members, the pages are managed by your freelance web designer and your outsourced SEO is responsible for ensuring the content and code is search engine friendly.

But what happens when communication breaks down between all the stakeholders or a miscommunication occurs? It's more common than you might think and it can result in disaster for your web site. Here's a true story of how it happened to one of my clients:

The site in question was being re-designed by the client's 3rd party web designers and the client asked me (as their SEO) to send them a list of instructions to follow during the re-design and launch that would ensure they didn't lose search engine visibility. Naturally I sent the client a list of the usual things to watch out for, including:

• Ensuring that any URLs being replaced or moved had 301 redirects placed on them to their new locations.

• Transferring the optimized title and meta tags to new page versions.

• Implementing a custom 404 page; and

• Building a replacement XML sitemap for Google and Yahoo.

So a week later the client tells me that the new site is now live and would I have a quick check to see if everything is ok? I opened the site and typed in each of the URLs for the pages I had carefully optimized months before. The first one came up with a big ugly 404 Not Found error. Not a custom 404 error page, but an ugly white server-generated one with no design, no branding, no apology and (more importantly) no links back to the main site. So I tried the next one. Same story - 404 error.

As I went down the list, I became more and more concerned. Less than half of the pages I optimized had been transferred to the new site. When I checked their site logs in ClickTracks, I noticed that around half of the page views generated since the site re-launch were 404 errors. Not only that, but a quick check of Google Webmaster Tools showed a small fraction of the original number of site pages as being indexed. Obviously Googlebot had been shown the 404 errors too and had promptly removed the old pages from the Google index. Disaster!

I contacted the client and told her to get a custom 404 page implemented as soon as possible and to double check that 301 redirects from their old page URLs to the corresponding pages on the new site had been put in place by the design team, as per my instructions. Turns out the designers never received explicit instructions about this from the client and didn't know that:

a) a custom 404 page was important

b) 301 redirects were necessary to ensure the continuation of search engine indexing.

I found this news quite shocking - what web designer/programmer doesn't understand the need to redirect old URLs to new ones?

Plus, we found out later that the few pages that the designers HAD successfully transferred to the new template did not have the carefully optimized Title and META Tags transferred, meaning that all the hard-won rankings we had earned for the client had now vanished. The designer’s excuse? They weren't SEO experts so didn't know tag transfer was necessary. I found this excuse pretty flimsy considering they managed to transfer the rest of the page HTML code intact.

This started a chain of urgent emails back and forth between the client, the designers and myself, with the designers blaming the client and me for not providing clear enough instructions, me blaming the designers for not taking the initiative to protect the client's site traffic during the move and the client caught in the middle trying to appease everyone. The emails escalated until finally the designers admitted defeat and acknowledged that they should have paid more attention to the client's instructions.

It took a couple of weeks for the designers to upload a custom 404 error page and I still had to manually login to the client's CMS to replace the optimized Title and META tags. As this goes to press, the client site has started to recover in the rankings, the 301 redirects are back in place, the number of pages indexed by Google is increasing, but the site stats are still showing a large number of 404 pages delivered to searchers. I expect it to take upwards of 3 months for the site to fully recover from the disaster.

The whole saga just goes to prove that you can't assume your site is in capable hands. If you are about to make extensive changes to your site design or move it to a new domain, you absolutely have to have a rollout plan in place with crystal clear instructions and tasks allocated to a team so everyone knows who is responsible for what. Otherwise you will be paying the penalties for months to come.

Related Articles
  Planning for the Unthinkable
  When Disaster Strikes, What's Your Plan B?
  A Backup Plan For Your Business: How Good Is Your Second Serve?
  Business Continuity Plan
  Do You Know Where Your Disaster Recovery Plan Is

Home > SEO > Kalena Jordan > Planning for Web Site Disaster
Article Tags: 301 redirects, 404 not found error, apology, business web, clicktracks, custom 404 error, freelance web designer, google, house staff, launch, meta tags, miscommunication, page versions, party web, search engine visibility, seo, staff members, stakeholders, true story, web designers

About the Author: Kalena Jordan
RSS for Kalena's articles - Visit Kalena's website

Kalena Jordan is the search industry’s first agony aunt, here to answer your tricky questions about search engines. Kalena is Co-Founder and Director of Studies at Search Engine College, an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects. She’s been marketing websites online since 1996 and blogging about search since 2002. For her full bio, view Kalena’s Linked In Profile. When not working, Kalena likes to go geocaching, hiking or fishing. She also plays a mean darabuka.

Click here to visit Kalena's website
Dashed Line

More from Kalena Jordan
Back to the Future SEO
How to Convert Customers While You Sleep
SEM Industry Standards Nonsense or Necessary
Before Launching Your SEO Campaign
What Do Busy SEM Professionals Keep in Their Toolkit


Related Forum Posts
Contingency Planning and Disaster Recovery: A Small Business Contingency Planning and Disaster Recovery: A Small Business - Contingency Planning and Disaster Recovery: A Small Business Guide Donna R. Childs, Stefan Dietrich 2002 "Among the countless tragic lessons of 9/11, an overlooked but important discovery was the lack of preparedness among small and midsized businesses for responding to disaster. While most of the media attention was naturally devoted to...., the very existence of thousands of small businesses was determined by whether or not they had adequate insurance, sufficient technological support, and viable disaster contingency plans." (People who live in hurricane prone areas need this as well...and who knows when a fire might not strike...) Table of Contents 1. Preparation 2. Response 3. Recovery 4. SAmple IT Solutions Basic safety practices Okay, the TOC isn't [i:2fu76idt]too [/i:2fu76idt]helpful, but there's lots of valuable info in this book, as to ensure that [i:2fu76idt]your [/i:2fu76idt]losses won't be catastrophic. How people cope with suddenly seeing their homes and all their possessions gone, what kinds of insurance to get, etc. etc.
Re: How do you make the most of your day? Re: How do you make the most of your day? - Planning, To Do lists, and deadlines all help me. Also being self critical of my own time management helps me raise the bar. I still check email too often though.
Books for Women Entrepreneurs Books for Women Entrepreneurs - There's a thread for good books in the Resources folder, but it doesn't target books for businesswomen particularly, so I figured I'd start such a thread here. It doesn't matter how successful you are in your business - it's always possible to learn something new. In subsequent posts I give Table of Contents and brief descriptions for various titles - most of them devoted to the businesswoman - and sometimes a review. If anyone else has read a review, or has read the book and found it useful, please comment! 1. The Old Girl's Network 2. Mother's Work 3. The 7 Greatest Truths About Successful Women 4. Pitch Like A Girl 5. Workplace Warrior 6. Treasure Hunt: Inside the Mind of the Modern Consumer 7. Contingency Planning & Disaster Recovery 8. She Wins, You Win 9. Napoleon On Project Management 10. Why Good Girls Dont' Get Ahead, But Gutsy Girls Do 11. Comeback Moms: How to Leave Work, Raise Children, and Restart your Career even If you Haven't Had a Job in Years 12. The One Minute Millionaire 13. Talking From 9 to 5 14. Soloing: Realizing Your Life's Ambitions 15. 101 Best Home Based Businesses for Women: Everything You Need to Know About Getting Started on the Road To Success 16. Work With Passion: How to Do What You Love for a Living. Revised and Expanded 17. Fail-Proof Your Business: Beat the Odds and be Successful 18. Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End 19. Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide 20. Millionaire Women Next Door: The Many Journeys of Successful American Businesswomen 21. Start Small, Finish Big: Fifteen Key Lessons to Start - and Run - Your Own Successful Business 22. Rewired, Rehired or Retired: A Global Guide for the Experienced Worker 23. The Martha Rules: 10 essentials for achieving success as you start, build or manage a business 24. The Essentials of Entrepreneurship: What it takes to create Successful Enterprises 25. Net Ready: Strategies for Success in the E-conomy 26. The Promotable Woman 27. Leave The Office Earlier: The Productivity Pro shows you how to do more in less time and feel great about it 28. The Work At Home Balancing Act: The professional resource guide for managing yourself, your work, and your family at home 29. Secrets of Six-Figure Women
Re: Success Re: Success - I think it was Gary Player who said the harder I practice the luckier I become when it came to his success as a world class golfer. Planning and dedication to a task can make all the difference between success and failure. MichelleJ
Re: Quote of the Day - "If you hesitate, some bolder hand will s Re: Quote of the Day - "If you hesitate, some bolder hand will s - Excellent quote, Evan. This reminds me of the saying, "The early bird catches the worm." It's important to act on impulses, rather than hesitate and plan. Planning isn't a bad thing and is warranted in certain cases, but those who act quickly will get a step ahead of the competition.


Recommended Article for You close

  Planning for the Unthinkable

Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.



Featured Article


Bottom Footer
Share for a Cause












Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!
Name:
Email:
Popular Articles

Severance and Separation Agreements

The OLD Way of Advertising, May Not be so OLD

The Death of the Sales Magazine

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.