What happens if you launch a new website and don’t keep your SEO specialist in the loop?
Here’s the story…short version, I promise. A long-term client wants a super graphical website design. Lots of images, videos and flash. We explain that flash is being phased out and that we like pretty websites too, but there has to be a balance in text content also. The client, despite working with us very successfully for several years, decides to use another web designer, with the intention of keeping us for inbound, SEO and social media marketing.
We say “OK, that’s fine”,”but if the designer doesn’t follow our instructions, you could loose your current high rankings, so make sure he does what we ask, please.” We could have said nothing and charged the client again for SEO work, but that’s not our style. We were just trying to protect this client’s investment. We forwarded some instruction to the designer, mostly copy and paste stuff and a couple of procedures for the transition and launch of the new site. These were all ignored, of course, and the following happened in less than 24 hours. Please see image below.
We learned of this on late Friday afternoon (12/14/2012) and immediately added a custom 404 error page. First thing next week we’ll add 301 redirects for all the indexed (old) URL’s that are on the search engines now, re-add the site map and re-SEO the website (where we can). There is almost no text on the new home page, so it will be a challenge. Odd thing was, the designer moved the Google analytic code, but nothing else; that’s how we got this data. Stay tuned to see how long it takes to get their SEO and website traffic back on course.
Thinking about a website redesign? Want to keep your SEO rankings? Keep your SEO Pro in the loop!
Don’t have an SEO company? Contact the SEO PRO’s at 510-276-9902.