It's Monday morning after a holiday week, in the midst of summer. That can only mean one thing... no one's reading blogs. It therefore, seems like a good time to complain about my least favorite problems - the ones that snarl up search traffic or kill rankings entirely, and shouldn't still be an issue after the years of best practices education that web developers & CMS operators have obviously paid no heed.
#5 - Uneditable Sections
We in the business like to call this electronic information medium the Internet, so as to help imply that it's not Radio, TV or Print. In those mediums, you only get one take. In this one, the idea is to have unlimited possibilities for change and update.
"Oh, no... I'm sorry Rand, we can't make changes to those pages. They're controlled by the IT department and it would take months of forms and approvals from the board of directors (who, by the way, doesn't meet again until next October). We'll have to find a workaround."
This particularly nasty problem seems to crop up at the most inopportune times. Sometimes I think of it as natural selection on the web - if your business isn't nimble enough to make simple changes to your web site in a few hours (at most), there's a competitor who's more than happy to eat your lunch.
#4 - Content "Partnerships"
Usually, when I think partnership, I think of two parties benefiting from some type of sharing or exchange, and not one party signing away all of its web traffic in exchange for 1/10th of a cent per article.
"Well, the problem is... we signed that agreement last year and we don't really have any control over what they do with the content beyond the initial agreement."
This really becomes an issue when the "content" in question is ALL of the web content owned by the client and the partner's site is getting all the search traffic (thanks to the lovely duplicate content penalty). A word to the wise - licensing your content to other websites without including the phrase "<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">" can be hazardous to your search health.
#3 - The Tracking Code that Ate New Jersey
Cosby fans unite - that chicken heart has nothing on the fear unbridled session ID addicts instill in me.
"Rand, we can't get rid of the session IDs and cookies. They provide the data we use to improve the sites performance."
Website performance? I'll show you website performance! Just kidding - I'm never actually violent or angry with clients. I really feel empathy with them; it's no fun trying to build a great site, only to find out one of your most important visitors (search engines) are half blind, completely deaf, don't follow instructions and can't read 50% of the languages you're trying to speak (figuratively speaking of course). Honestly, though, perfect tracking can be done without any session IDs in the URL, required cookies or other nasty bits sure to choke the life out of hugry spiders.
#2 - Congruity in Meta Data
Normally, I'm a fan of congruity, but as mom always said - moderation in everything...
"Actually, our CMS just lets us edit the page content. The titles and meta tags are universal throughout the site. We just figured we'd always want to target the same keywords as strongly as possible."
Well, you thought wrong. Search engines aren't returning web "sites" in the results, they return web "pages." Thus, it's most unwise to tell a search engine that every page on your 500 page site is about "squidly dinky doos" - that's going to make it very hard for them to figure out which page to return. You dilute the value of your links, your targeting and your keyword placement and now we have to re-write the CMS to fix an error that never should have been made in the first place. What a pleasure this will be.
#1 - Taking Canonicalization too Far
Yes, I know how much I preach about 301's and fewer URLs for the same content, but some people take that advice to a truly absurd level.
"Our site has lots of pages - thousands, actually. It's just that the address bar always stays the same."
This one usually spells the worst headaches of all. The most visible culprit is the .mac blogging platform, but there are plenty of private label CMS' and individual web developers who thought it would be just dandy if the URL never changed as the user surfed from page to page. It's one thing when the solution is just removing frames, but it's another beast entirely when the programming is calling a script to change the page, rather than pulling new html documents. To me it's like a book where all the text is written on one page, but in different colored layers. You just have to read between the orange and red to get to the green (oh, and you better not be colorblind).
Any client website issues that get your knickers in a bind?
I don't understand how a lot of clients suddenly become usability experts once it's their site you're putting together. They hire you with an inherent trust that you know more about design and usability than they do, but they themselves end up dictating how everything goes together. This end result is usually pretty poor.
If I ever hire a plumber I'm going to stand behind him and tell him exactly how to fix the crapper, because hey.. it's my crapper and we understand each other.
Sometimes client might know more than you think.
Now... here are plumber rates in my town...
* If you let me do the work... $50/hour * If you watch... $60/hour * If you help... $70/hour * If you laugh... $80/hour * If you screwed it up before calling me... $100
Matt has his plumber on speed dial.
Yeah, sometimes it is in the best interest of the client not to do what he wants, but to just create a good website. Of course, some clients may not appreciate this. How do you deal with these situations anyway? What if the client insists he/she is right?
Then you must reflect, at least for ten minutes on the possiblity that you might be wrong.
I am wrong most of the time - or at least build something that can be improved significantly.
Your client knows a lot about his biz - more than you ever will. The best result will probably be by determining who is right - where.
"I don't know what I should put on my Web site, but I want to put something there."
I believe this is a very common response. Is there anyone more suitable than a SEO to answer this?
We have seen more sites than anyone, we write "interesting" stuff for linkbait, we've worked on a hundred different industries' websites, who else knows more?
You don't have to be an expert. You can just look around competitors' sites to get an initial feel of what should be there. Then you can talk with some company employee to find out what are the important points in their industry. I don't see the problem with this request.
Yes, clients who want tiny font and all-flash, particularly when they can tell you that their client base is 'older people' Ahhh!
At #3. Had a discussion earlier today with someone about spider traps, a calendar in this specific case. A calendar where each date was a link, 20 years of links, and he couldn't understand that could be a problem.
7300 + identical pages and a potential server crash when the poor spider enters the infinitive "time machine" is always a problem.
Far too often I see marketing departments take little interest in search aside from wanting to rank well. This leaves many of the search 'responsibilities' to the IT department which is often swamped with a heavy workload and a desire to end projects as soon as possible.
The biggest hurdle is getting those two departments to work together. Once you're able to referee a friendly dialogue, improvements can move along at a good clip but reaching that point can take some time and a lot of gin and tonics.
Still one of the most frusterating for me, is the "We need our 50Mb flash only entry page" type people. Nevermind the 50% of people that will leave as soon as they get to the website.
Another is the 4 instant redirect, anti-backout script that even some reputable websites still use...
Well said Rand. I find a special kind of frustration with #2.
I would also like to add: #6 Doing it Client Side The developers that use almost no actual html seem to be the most vocal about how I should be optimizing a site.