When a Website Designer’s Good Intentions Go Bad
Today I am meeting with a client to review the design and build of his new website. Quite frankly I’m not looking forward to this meeting. I am the barrier of bad news.
When I originally accepted this project, I could see Google had indexed about 1,000 pages within his domain. While it would take some time to migrate and optimize this many pages, I was up for the challenge. The goal is to give him a more SEO friendly site that he can maintain himself in WordPress. If that meant throwing in some plugins and optimizing 1,000 pages, so be it.
Last week I reviewed his Google Analytics reports, dug deeper into his content pages, and investigated his existing website’s structure. Through Google Analytics I could see he didn’t have 1,000 pages, he had about 10,000 pages. Why were they not showing up in Google’s index? Well I figured this out a bit later as I reviewed page by page content on his existing website. Of these 10,000 pages, about 3,000 or so are the exact same pages. Okay, three different pages, but applied to 1,000 different products. You may be asking yourself so what and thinking I am a drama queen. To me, the drama queen, all I saw was a big red flag waving with a large Google logo hovering overheard. This was trouble with a capital T.
These 3,000 plus pages represent duplicate content to Google. Why would Google cloud their index with 3,000 pages of the exact same content? Google won’t do it. It would simply corrode the overall search results, which would frustrate Google users, so Google is not going to do it. Google will also most likely penalize the overall site for this mass amount of duplicated content.
I have already told my client I will not migrate this duplicate content. The SEO consultant in me cannot do it, because I know it is wrong. The website designer in me won’t do it, because I know it will degrade the user experience as well. So I get to now explain this to my client and hope he understands that my intentions are good.
Now I will return to his website, his Google Analytics reports, and to the broken sitemaps to see what else lurks beneath the covers of this existing website. I believe my 3,000 pages of duplicate content is only the tip of the iceberg and I am afraid the Titanic is getting ready to go down.
State of the Index Presentation is a Great Read
At last week’s PubCon conference in Las Vegas, Matt Cutts gave a presentation on Google and recent Google advancements. This is a good read for website developers, in-house webmasters, and SEO consultants. From Social Search to Pagetest to Google Web Toolkit, Matt gives a number of good takeaways.
Popularity Contests Take It to the Next Level With Social Media
Web Analytics 2.0 Hits the Stores
Today I ordered Web Analytics 2.0, which is the second book by Avinash Kaushik, the best selling author of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day. As an avid website designer, SEO nut, social media fan, and overall Internet marketing addict, I can’t wait for delivery of my new purchase.
I already subscribe to Avinash’s very popular blog Occam’s Razor, which provides insightful discussion on Google Analytics and the software’s newest functionality. I enjoy his blog entries and cannot wait to immerse myself in an entire book of his Internet intelligence.
You can learn more about Avinash and his new book at www.webanalytics20.com.
WordPress is the Liberator of Growing Businesses Everywhere
I have always been a fan of WordPress. Okay, let me rephrase that. Since I discovered WordPress, I have always been a great fan. Similar to other people, I was hesitant at first. I thought it was simply a blogging application with limited capabilities. I equated it to Google’s Blogger and thought it was solely used for bloggers and it was much to limited for a real corporate website.
Thankfully, I was wrong. WordPress liberated me and it has liberated many website designers and business owners around the world. It is liberating because it is free and it is easy enough for normal – non website designers – people to use. WordPress is robust enough to create elaborate websites, while simple enough an in-house marketing person or business owner to add content and update.
A case in point is a client that just launched a WordPress website. The client is an ERP consulting company based out of Denver, Colorado. More importantly, the client had a limited website needed to upgrade because the company is rapidly growing. I proposed WordPress and the client agreed, then they jumped fully into design mode with me as we added plug-in upon plug-in to do such things as automated imports of news feeds, polls, quizzes, videos, events, live chat, and on and on. As a web designer I love this enthusiasm. It is great to offer a suggestion that your client not only likes, but that they build upon with their own ideas.
At the end of this project my client has a website that is robust, functional, and has solid growth potential. They can maintain it internally or hire a million different WordPress experts around the world to jump in at anytime. They are liberated and a little open source package called WordPress made this liberation possible.
The client and their transformation reminds me of a saying my Grandmother always said.
Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime.
A normal website is a fish, but WordPress is the lesson of fishing.
Copyright 2009 Web Savvy Marketing | P.O. Box 752 Union Lake, Michigan 48387 | 248.360.3999 | info@web-savvy-marketing.com
