Columnist Andrew Shotland
took on a client who'd lost rankings as a result of a site redesign. Here's
what he did to help them recover.
Andrew Shotland
Redesigning websites while
maintaining their SEO is akin to diamond cutting. One wrong move and you could
lose all your organic traffic, not to mention your job.
But in
these days of Google penalties, thin content warnings, manual spam actions, UGC
spam warnings, etc., it’s often tempting to take a site that has been hit hard,
toss it in the garbage and start over again.
The
challenge is that if you don’t think through the SEO issues, you are more than
likely going to speed up your race to the bottom.
If your site has lost a lot of organic rankings and you are about
to change it dramatically, you and the rest of your team may want to read this
first.
Do you still have any organic traffic? If so, is that traffic of
any value?
While
your site may not be generating organic leads the way it used to pre-penalty,
it still may be bringing in meaningful business. Before you redo the site, you
should understand that you are putting that remaining business at risk if you
do not take it into account before you start the redesign.
I was
prompted to write this because we recently took on a multi-location lawyer
client that had re-launched its site without understanding the SEO
implications. Earlier in the year, its old site had lost about 80% of its
organic leads.
The site
had thousands of “SEO” pages that were basically spun <insert City + Keyword
here> “articles.” The strategy worked well for a year as they kept adding
pages and getting more traffic. Until one day it didn’t.
The
decision-makers (the web developer and the guy at the firm who was in charge of
online marketing but had another day job) had read enough “expert” posts about
how to recover from Google penalties to be dangerous, and they were.
The site
was re-launched with a much smaller footprint and woke up the next day to find
that it had lost almost all of its remaining organic lead volume. Law
offices are generally quiet places. They get really quiet when the phone no
longer rings.
So Why Did This Happen?
When you
redo a site, three primary SEO elements get affected:
1. The Internal Links
The way
you link to a page from other pages on the site impacts its ability to rank
well. A simple way to think about it is that if a page has a lot of internal
links, it is likely a more important page and so it probably will rank better,
all other things being equal, than a page that has fewer internal links.
If your
redesign reduces the number of internal links to a page, that page may
drop in the rankings. In the case of our lawyer site, pretty much every page
lost internal links, with unfortunate results.
2. The Content Of The Pages
If a page
has the word “blue” on it and it ranks for “blue,” then if you change “blue” to
“red,” there’s a good chance that you will lose your rankings for “blue.” When
a page gets redesigned, the content often gets rewritten without regard to the
phrases it previously was ranking for.
You may
be the F. Scott Fitzgerald of Mesothelioma Attorney landing pages, but if your
lead form falls in the forest with no one around, does it make a sound?
(There’s a good metaphor in there somewhere, I think.)
In the
case of our intrepid attorneys, they rewrote every page without really taking
the terms they still ranked for into consideration.
3. The “SEO DNA”
The first
two elements deal with what happens when you change a page, but what about when you delete a page? With Panda issues, it’s tempting to nuke every
page that you think is causing problems.
Many
gurus imply that getting rid of thin content is the key to post-Panda nirvana.
In fact, I seem to recall Google’s own Amit Singhal once saying in an
interview that many sites rarely cut enough to recover. (Anyone got a link to
that reference?)
We have
had success curing sites with millions of URLs and sites with ten URLs of Panda
issues, and it often involves reworking content, noindexing, blocking URLs in
robots.txt, and other tactics that make execs’ eyes glaze over. But the nuclear
option is a blunt instrument, and deleting a page means deleting internal links,
deleting all of the content, and fundamentally changing the “SEO DNA” of the
site.
In the
case of Dr. Strangelove & Partners, attorneys at law, they 404’d 99% of
their site’s URLs – subsequently, all of their leads 410’d. (The
410 error indicates a page is Gone!)
So What Can You Do If This
Happens To You?
In the
case of our client, we were faced with two choices:
1. Try To Work With The New Site To Recover Rankings
This
would be a slow, expensive process as we would have to first research which old
URLs were getting traffic for what keywords, come up with a strategy to add new
pages to the site — basically re-architect the site — write a lot of new copy,
figure out an effective plan to 301 redirect the old URLs that were no longer
in use to relevant new URLs, and implement an off-page strategy.
Hard to
say what the recovery time would be, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it took at
least 3-6 months. Considering the site had already been dead in the water for
three months, it’s safe to say that the client would probably not love
this strategy.
2. Rollback The Old Site
Sometimes you
don’t realize what you’ve got till it’s gone, but if you pave a relative
lead-generating paradise to put up a parking lot, you can often roll back the
changes and see a fast recovery.
It
doesn’t work all the time, particularly if a lot of time has passed and the old
site’s 404’d URLs have been recrawled often enough by Google that whatever
juice they had left has faded. Luckily, the good news about having a SMB
site is that Google probably doesn’t crawl it all that often.
Thankfully,
the old lawyer site was still sitting on someone’s hard drive, and with a
little pride-swallowing, we convinced them to put it back up. And here’s what
that looked like:
Within a
week, the phones were ringing again. Within three weeks, the site had hit its
highest organic traffic in 6 months.
Sure it
hadn’t recovered to its previous heights, and it was still vulnerable to the
issues that had been killing it before the re-launch, but at least Florrick,
Agos & Associates was back in business and we could start the work of
fixing the old site in a less-risky way — improving the content, strategically
removing or redirecting problematic pages, and investing in outreach to market
the business.
So if you
think you’ve been hit with a Google penalty and someone is telling you the site
needs to be totally redone, I am not saying don’t do it. I am saying make sure
you know what you are doing before you do it, as the nuclear option can often
lead to a nuclear winter.
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