Happy Halloween mozzerati! Oh, Roger wants me to tell you: "Trick or treat!" Actually, this week we've got a lot more treats than tricks for you. Our treats will even help you overcome some of the nasty trixes of the SEO world! Jen Lopez, our Community Manager at SEOmoz, is here to tell you about some of the scary SEO mishaps that could happen to you if you're not careful. You're going to want to watch this one all the way through; I hear there's a wiked Halloween mozzter mash at the end! Roger may even go trick or treating after the credits...
Video Transcription
Hi, everyone. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. As you can tell, both Rand and Danny are out of town and they have left me, Jen Lopez, the Community Manager here at SEOmoz, with the reins. [sinister laugh]
Today we're going to do something a little fun. We're going to talk about making sure to not let these scary SEO mishaps happen to you. Some of you may have noticed I actually sent a Tweet out last night asking for everyone to let me know some of the scariest things that have happened to their site. These are really the top three things that people talked about and things that I have personally seen both here at SEOmoz and at previous jobs.
The first one is to fear the agony of sitewide de-indexing. [eerie wail in background] This can happen a number of different ways. A rogue developer or a developer that doesn't understand what a major impact something can make. It could be a host. It could be a number of different things, but there are various ways to do this.
The first one is robots in the robots.txt disallowing all. I've also seen this where we did major rewrites of a ton of URLs, a bunch of redirects, and the developer thought, "Oh, well, since we're redirecting these URLs, we should disallow all of these thousands and thousands of pages from the robots.txt because we don't want them crawled anymore.' It essentially completely killed weeks and weeks' worth of 301 redirects because all those pages were poof, no longer being served in the index.
The next one is canonicalize all pages to the home page. Last week, Dr. Pete did a great post, a very scary post, about how he added the rel=canonical tag to every page on his home page and it always redirected them all back to the home page. I'll let you take a look, but it was essentially catastrophic. He was lucky enough to get some of the pages back, and he wrote a very funny reinclusion request. But I don't think most people would have gotten the same results. So, don't do that.
The next thing is adding the no index tag to every page. I've seen this happen. Sometimes a developer goes in and they want to set it up so that the no index tag shows up on certain pages, paginated pages for example. But the code that they wrote isn't quite right, and actually the no index tag is showing up on every page. I specifically had this happen. It took about two weeks for all of the pages to be de-indexed and for the hair to start coming out, people are freaking out, running around, where are all of my pages, to find out that one simple little tag at the top of the page on every page removed all the pages from the index.
So just be sure to watch those three things. Sometimes it is not always you who is updating it. Like I said, it's a developer, it's a development team, it's something else. Just be sure to watch it. Make sure that you are going through and checking those out now and then.
The next one is, don't let your CMS kill your rankings. [sinister laugh in background] That's scary. There are a number of things that your CMS (content management system) can do to your site that will actually kill your rankings. We've seen this several times. I worked on a site once where it was builtin.net and we used something called DotNetNuke, maybe many of you have used this before, and it created tons of duplicate content. Every single page on the site had at least three URLs that you could get to. You had to use plug-ins and various things in order to do redirects and that sort of thing. It was very, very difficult to set up.
The other one are theme or design issues. Michelle Robbins actually sent me a message today and said, "Okay, I have a doozy here. It's much more than 140 characters." She sent me a message about a friend of hers who went through a site redesign. They set her up in WordPress. They picked a great theme and did some modifications to it, redesigned it and all this stuff. The site goes up, and two or three weeks later they are wondering, "Why aren't any of our pages indexed? I don't even rank for the actual site name. What in the heck is going on?" They realized that the theme that they had chosen didn't allow title tags on the page. She also had a number of widgets and various things so the internal linking was broken. Essentially, it was the theme that killed her website. She had to go in and do a bunch of modifications. So just make sure that when you pick that amazing theme for your website that it is not hurting your ranking.
Another big issue is, oftentimes, if you have a big huge CMS sometimes maybe a homegrown one that's five, six, ten years old, it doesn't allow for 301 redirects or even easily set up the canonical tag. Just be sure, be aware of some of those things when you're setting up your CMS, you're changing to a new one, whatever the case may be.
The third one, the third one is really horrible. Beware of those gruesome backlinks. [eerie roar in background] Yikes, that one gave me shivers. Watch out. These are some black cat, really scary tactics. But I actually had several people come to me and say that they've seen this happen, which for the life of me I can't imagine doing, but, you know, there are people out there. So watch out for competitors, revengeful employees, bad agencies, whatever the case may be. They can go out and whether it's hijack your backlinks, they buy a bunch of spammy backlinks from bad neighborhoods and whatnot, and all of a sudden your pages are getting de- indexed. You're noticing you have a penalty, you have no idea why. You think everything is happy and chipper. And then you go to Open Site explorer, put in your site, and you see all these ridiculous links. Another tactic people can take is to sort of brand-jack you, right. Okay, that sounded really bad. But I think you know what I mean. They go in and they start ranking for your name in those tops SERPs.
I know that is a completely separate topic but it is rather scary. It's just something that when you are, we all obsess over rankings, so every day you're checking your analytics, you're checking to see if your rankings are still in place, you're checking on all these things, but don't forget these three things. Don't forget that these can happen and don't forget to double check. Maybe it is a weekly or a monthly process of going in and having a checklist of, "Let's make sure that these nasty things aren't happening to me." You'll be on your merry way.
I hope everyone has a great Halloween. As you can see, Roger over here is going trick-or-treating. Here at the SEOmoz office, we are having a big Halloween party today. I hope you guys have an absolutely great weekend. Next week, I promise, Rand or Danny, the really cool guys, they'll be back. See you next week. Bye.
[Awesome dance party]
[Roger Trick-or-Treating]
Boo!
Video transcription by SpeechPad.com
Follow SEOmoz on Twitter! I'd love it if you'd follow me too: Aaron Wheeler.
If you have any tricks or treats that you've learned along the way, we'd love to hear about it in the comments below. Post your comment and be heard! Happy Halloween!
Hey Jen - nice job on whiteboard Friday! Thanks for sharing my friend's nightmare - I think next time she'll call me first :) It is one of the perils of a platform like WordPress being so easy for someone (who doesn't know any better) to setup and deploy. She was working with a good designer, picked what she thought was a great (premium - she'd paid for it!) theme, and ended up disappearing from the SERPs. Scary indeed!!
TITLE tags? Pshaw. Only lazy SEOs use those ;)
Haha! It gets better Pete - the theme she chose and setup, doesn't allow you to link the headers of the sidebar widgets. Literally, was stripping them out so any internal linking could only happen in the copy text, not headers. And no way to add title tags to pages at all - you could set one blog title and it used that on every page. Cuz, um, that makes great sense. She called me after they'd deployed and disappeared from the SERPs. Blerg. #apoxonthehousesoflamethemedevs
Thanks for the great info Michelle! I hope I told the story correctly... it's one thing to write it down and another to say it with a camera in your face. eek!
You did great :) I think you got the gist of it covered -
As others have mentioned in this thread and I know has been covered elsewhere on the site, a little bit of knowledge (easy to use CMS) can be a dangerous thing. Unfortunately, people *still* tend to think about search engines and seo *after the fact* instead of before and during planning site redesigns or platform changes. boo.
I'm so glad Michelle shared the WordPress "scare" - something I wouldn't even imagine happening. However, this helps us troubleshoot and help others to avoid such a mishap. It's a perfect example of what happens when the barrier to entry is lowered. OUCH.
Great frightening WBF - you really made my laugh!!
I wish you a happy Halloween Party :-)
LOL! Awesome! Thanks for starting my morning off with a laugh. Happy Halloween everyone!
Happy Halloween!
Jen! You are a WBF star we all love to see more!
Just curious about who was in charge of the scary sounds effects ;)
and... finally, for all those ones that experienced the freaky scaring & horrifing experience to see a yourbrand.tld site creeping your reputation online, check what ICANN can do for you.
Ah! Do not loose the occasion to read two great YOUmoz posts online right now (murble murble one in mine murble murble...)
Thanks Gianluca. :) That was Aaron doing the great sound effects!
Jen - What a great WBF! I like the extra sound effects too. :)
My worst SEO mishap was with a client. There's a setting on his CMS that swaps the site name with the page title in the title tag. He accidentally flipped it and ended up with a "Super Long Website Name - Page Title" instead of "Page Title - Super Long Website Name," creating tons of duplicate title tags on his site. Ouch!
If anyone else uses Squarespace, make sure you're aware of this setting. One checkbox is all it takes to screw up your SEO!
I came into the office this morning after battling a very cold Scottish miserable dreich day, it made me sad.
Then I watched the WFB today and at the end I laughed and laughed - those 'orrible feelings disappeared.
Thanks for the tips today, great stuff.
You guys have too much fun at times.
Have a spooky Halloween.
Best
David
Now THAT is what I like to hear. :) Now you just made my day!
Awesome job Jen, I liked the segment on how your CMS theme can destroy your rankings. There are so many themes out there for WordPress that it really requires a fair amount of due diligence from the webmaster. A little bit of research goes a long way in making sure you’re not choosing the “SEO Nightmare” theme.
TOO LATE! Our site is already RIP.Actually, it's not Resting In Peace yet. It's leaving this world the way it entered it -screaming!!
PART 1 was the most relevant to me.Bad times indeed.But hey, I had nothing to do with it. Not that that's any consolation :(
Now we're doing a site reinclusion request... now that's SCARY!!
I think this calls for a scary reinclusion scenarios post. Are you up to it? :)
Oh no! What happened?
Nice work Jen, Maybe we don't need the guys any more ;-)
One of those scary moments was the reason I got into SEO...quick time.
Hey Jen! Amazing whiteboard! Loved this funny-hallowen style!
You might also want to add those nasty ftp viruses to the list.
They were adding a crappy iframe that was redirecting to other websites and users were getting a warning in their browsers - "this website has malware, stay away" or smth like that, remember that RED sad screen in Firefox?! My website was still ranking #1 but that warning reduced the traffic to about 30%. It was horrible until I cleaned the code from the pages (sometimes they were overwriting the footers, sometimes they were hiding the code in the header and it was encrypted). Sometimes a few days after cleaning, the iframe was back, driving me crazy. I'm not sure how I got rid of it but I still think it was a ftp virus and then I switched to mac and never heard of it again. :> It not only screwed my personal blog but also several of our clients websites which was really bad and frustrating. Usually they were modifying the files that had "index" in their names (index php, index html, etc).
When I was learning Wordpress a few years ago, trying to solve the duplicate content problem I was dumb enough to apply a noindex tag to all the pages and my website vanished from Google for a few days until I fixed that.
By the way, sometimes the hosting is down or it has really big problems - do you know how long before Google kicks you out of the index if the website isn't available?
We can haz moar whiteboardz with Jen? Pls. Kthxbye.
Great WBF!
Wow point number 2 scared me as I'm developing a new WP site but my dog jumped up out of her basket when she heard the ghostly noises coming from my computer!
Thanks, it brightened up a Scottish morning.
Great stuff.. I never knew SEO could be this much fun.
Greetings from London,
Mark
Nice work Jen!
Love watching you in action :o)
@Jen - You looked FANTASTIC! It is so great to see you looking so ding dang healthy! Whoo hoo!
@Aaron - Your sound effects were awesome. Don't suppose you'd be available to give candy out at my house to the trick or treaters??
@WBF - Those were some great (and very spooky) DO NOT DO THIS tips. Seriously. And the drawings on the board were the best ever.
Aww why thank you. :) I'm feeling super great these days! I actually had our 2 designers work on the design of the Whiteboard. Plus most of the dancers are the development & customer service teams. :) It really was a full team process!
Jen, I was thinking the same thing. You look spooky! NOT! You look marvelous.
But aside from that you are such a natural on camera and explain principles very well. Feel free to send the boys away now and then so we have you as a Whiteboard Friday Treat.
Thank you! I'd love to but I'll probably be out getting candy myself. =) Maybe you can just play the WBF whenever kids come in proximity of the house? If the spooky sounds don't scare them, the scary SEO mishaps will!
Happy Halloween!
I always look forward to WBF and you did not let me down. Jen, you did a fantastic job! It was informative and entertaining.
Just fantastic Jen! I really enjoyed it! Thank you and all the team. My scariest SEO thing was loosing some PageRank on some internal pages we have, not that I was worried about it, but having my boss howling like a werewolf from his office:
"Where is my PageRaaaaaaaaank????!!!!! aaaawwwwuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu........"
That was scary!.
PS. Nice seeing Roger around.
Excellent job Jen and have a Great Halloween! Boo
What a fun company! The best part of the video is the very end with everyone!
Thanks :) We really had fun with it. Happy Halloween!
Hi Jen. It was nice to see you on WBF . I think you were quite cool yourself . I don't think the guys will be missed if you take over WBF.
We ourselves also have experienced 2 scary things this year.
1) The canonical tag appearing on all the pages inspite of the developer being given instructions that this should not be done. But we realised it only when we started to lose the indexing and rankings . Was rectified but was really really scary.
2) our site www.webpro.in got hacked with all the spammy links to it and that was scary too.
But we have become very cautious now and I hope we don't face any scary experiences related to SEO on any of our sites in the coming year.
Have a nice Weekend!
Curious: Are you referring to canonical tags all pointing to the index page? Or just simply the use of canonical tags on every page?
Yes I mean the canonical tags all pointing to the index page ofcourse .
I'm terrified. :) Roger, don't have too much sugar.
Thanks for doing the Whiteboard Friday, Jen.
I'd definitely like to see some SEOmoz blogs or pro webinars about CMS and SEO.
It's al old post that should surely need to be updated, but here in SEOmoz the theme CMS & SEO was talked here: https://www.seomoz.org/blog/choosing-the-right-cms-platform-for-your-website-from-an-seo-perspective
Nice Job Jen! It was a great reminder video =) Enjoy your halloween.
Love the dance moves!
There's definitely a few spoooooky tactics here. Great WBF Jen, twas fun!
Nice WBF Jen! My first scary SEO mishap - robots.txt disallow all. Spooky!
There are a lot of excellent points here. Another good way to avoid de-indexing is to regularly add fresh content to your website, either with a new page or meaningfully updating existing ones.
If you use a CMS, there are a number of easy ways to do this such as implementing a custom news feed or starting a company blog (this can be accomplished without a CMS, but it's more tedious.) In any case, make sure your site stays relevant both in content and SEO strategy so that internet users can easily find your website and take value from the activity.
Hi Jen,
This was a fun video!! I'm not into Hollows Eve, but you were a refreshing addition to WBF! (and esier on the eyes than Rand and Danny :)
Super funny and dorky! Hey, thanks about bringing up the point of the backlink nightmare AND the CMS theme nightmare. Is there anyway to protect our websites from people posting links in bad neighborhoods?
i like video so much,so educationaly & helpfull
Very fun WBF! Great job, Jen!
Enjoyed the howl's! LOL
Regarding backlinks - I'm pretty sure Google has explicitly said that they don't penalise you for backlinks because you can't control who links to you. At most they devalue the bad backlinks (so they count for nothing), but they don't apply a penalty to your page.
So was interested to hear you say you have evidence to the contrary. Are you sure your friend's penalty was down to backlinks and not something else?
Jen, GREAT video. Very informational. Now that I'm having a site redesigned, I know what to look for from the developers. Mahalo.
The scariest thing about this video is that it includes some frighteningly outdated SEO concepts -- namely, that Google can "penalize" you for having incoming links from bad neighborhoods. It's a preposterous notion that someone could damage your ranking simply by linking to you. Google has said as much, and I don't see any reason why they would be fibbing about this matter in particular. It just doesn't make sense.
Thanks for the tips!
Brand jacking of my SEO clients is my biggest fear, along with seeing someone else purposefully employ black-hat tacticts to have Google penalize a client's site. Thankfully I haven't yet had to deal with this.
I looked into this a while back and it was scary to see how many search engine optimisation mistakes there are to be made... I'm just glad I haven't made any big mistakes myself yet. At the end of the day though, nobody is perfect and I'm thankful Google can be slightly forgiving if you do mess things up.
yeah, nice piece...but we're SO SO jammed up on the new Google BLEND (the merge tween Places and web results algo) that I only had time to gloss over this....
but will be back...so thanks!
:)Jim
My first SEO scare came not from any of these (thank God) but from my own bumbling ignorance. I knew nothing, absolutely nothing when I first got handed the website here. What were they thinking? ("Oh, she knows how to take apart the computer and make it run cooler... give her the website!")
Anyways, I stupidly went poking into the SQL database, changed a password when I couldn't access something initially. The next thing I know, my boss comes in, looks at me warily and says "Um... the website isn't working...?"
Sure enough, not only was it not working, it was completely and utterly fish-flopping dead. I promptly freaked out mentally "ZOMG I BROKE IT!!!". Fortunately, I'd had enough sense to write down everything I'd done... so after calming down enough to figure out the error I was getting, I backtracked and fixed it.
This has happened once more, but was an external error on the server end. By then, my boss knew my experimenting tendencies better and said "Jenn, you killed it again." At least my avid denials were true that time...
Now I have a special note to whoever comes into my spot here in a few weeks when my internship is up: "DO NOT CHANGE THIS."
Happy Halloween!
Gruesome backlinks are really scary. We are uncovering several poor backlinks from previous work and beginning to see the effect...
Great job Jen! You should do more of these.
Very fun WBF! :) So what can we do if we are hit with malicious backlinks?
Nice WBF. I have seen those frieghtful theme issues too. I recall one person ended up with no index, no follow on his whole site after a redesigned.
I am actually very curios to meet and talk with a website that fits the third tactic "But I actually had several people come to me and say that they've seen this happen"
You all are hilarious. Thanks for the WBF entertainment. Question: If you're using javascript redirects as opposed to 301's when transitioning to new pages, is it okay to use the Disallow: /oldpage.aspx or do you need to leave that open. Seems like duplicate content would be an issue since the redirected page could still be indexed.
woooooooo!!!!!, the scariest wbf ever
Wow! This is something new! Thanks for the info :)
I am scared :) lol
Our CMS greates millions of duplicated urls and wer are going to fix it, do you think will help our traffic to increase a lot? or let me rephrase my question, how much does duplicate content in a huge site with milions of products harm a website? Webmaster tools always tell us that we have too many urls.