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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.

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.

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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



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