Holgate
Woohoo it's happened to me at last…
Just received an inquiry by a guy who's rankings disappeared a year ago when he had his website redesigned by a new company.
After asking a few questions i was 99% sure of the reason so asked for the WP login and yes you guessed it they'd forgot to untick 'discourage search engines' when they built the site 😮
I've signed the client up and he's going to think I'm an SEO Hero when his keywords start showing on Google again in a few days.
The website was designed by probably the UK's biggest sellers of websites too lol.
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That's why we included detecting search engine blockade in the daily health check (one of the check types in our website monitoring service).
Tim
Awesome!
Submit the homepage to Google now in Search Console to make sure Google knows the site can be indexed.
Tim
This reminds me of a large department store chain that went out of business. Someone and set up the robots.txt to block their product pages. When I got the job interview I told him there was a horrible problem with their website that could easily be fixed in the first 10 minutes of my employment and would cover the $42,000 US salary. They ignored that and focused on the fact that I wasn’t bilingual. They never fixed the problem and 11,240 people lost their jobs.
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Wow, that's a pretty amazing story. It just shows you how important an online presence is these days and how important it is to maintain it properly.
Tim » Holgate
that and how cheap big companies like Sears Canada was
Marie
Does the company that made the mistake leave a footprint on their clients sites?
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They have a footer link on his site if that's what you mean.
Marie » David
yep. You could find a string of clients and ask if their site suddenly dropped? lol made the mistake once they made it twice. Three times.
Holgate ✍️ » Marie
That's a great idea 👍
Ben » Marie
wow that’s next-level
MilGeo » Marie
you should charge David for that idea 🙂
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Marie » MilGeo
perhaps if he lands a client I should think about it. lol
Chris » Marie
that's the first thing that always comes to my mind. There's a search engine that lets you search the HTML code of websites. If they don't have a signature footer text, you can look for signature HTML as well 😜
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Marie » Chris
can you post the search engine.
Chris » Marie
https://nerdydata.com/
NerdyData.com – Search The Web's Source Code for Technologies
Jarrett
This still shocks me. I see this all the time from site rebuilds, especially on very expensive sites that rewrite all the page content too for "branding". It's shocking to me how many branding and Web design companies I have no clue about SEO when that should be the foundation of how they build their websites.
100%
Ben Allen 🎓
This reminds me of a client I took on recently. They are a fair sized international jewelry company. They had a huge backlink profile from all the jewelry retailers linking to their site but just didn't do any on-page so those links were basically dormant.
They interviewed me and 6 other digital marketing agencies 3 times each. I told them I would be able to get them on the front page for keywords totaling 100K search volume in thr first 2 weeks because of their unusual SEO/backlink profile situation. All the other agencies were cookie cutter "digital marketing" companies and didn't see what I saw. They were all trying to sell them every service in the book: remarketing/retarketing, social media influencers, content marketing, YT video production, etc.
Anyway I won the client over and they made the front page for those keywords with 100K search volume in a week. All because their web design team didn't know how to add title tags.
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hey Ben! So interesting you say this because I'm in the exact same boat with an internationally known jewellery brand that also is missing tons of title tags and many other careless errors. They also have great PR and a killer backlink profile. Would love to trade stories!
Ben Allen 🎓 » Toth
– I would love to tell you more but they are a pretty well-known company so anything more specific I say will give them away 😂. And they made me sign an NDA.
Ben Allen 🎓 » Toth
– How recently did you take your client on?
Toth » Ben Allen
Last couple of weeks.
This may satisfy you: To Build a Relationship With a Client on SEO
Levi
Haha web creation?
I was going to keep it secret but yes lol. A few other things to mention is they didn't have a cache plugin, images weren't optimised, hardly any content and used a weird outdated theme.
The more I look at it, the more problems I find.
They even had the username for login as their company name and the password was part of the text from the URL!
Jarrett » Holgate
oh sweet.
James » Levi
these guys are honestly terrible. Their lack of security is worse than a 15 year olds GCSE school project and so are their ethics 😂
Lucas
This is honestly so common, even among large agencies. Because dev teams don't think about it even though it's their job to untick it when they are ready to push things live. It's always the marketing or SEO department that catches it. We've actually struggled with this as well and ultimately had to have a number of meetings to coordinate a set of guidelines with a checklist for the dev team to support marketing and SEO in order to ensure everything is completed properly and nothing is overlooked when pushing a clients site live.
Batt
so now you scrape all the data to find every site they make and find more mistakes.
This may satisfy you: What Guarantee can You Afford to Convince Your SEO Client?