Clean Up Ugly Listings

During your site visibility assessments, you probably found at least one listing in the search results that made you cringe. A broken URL from your domain available to the searching public? An out-of-date press release announcing the hire of a longgone CEO? Today you’ll take steps to clean up some of these brand-busting uglies. Here are some of the more common problems we’ve observed and how to deal with them. You probably won’t face all of these problems, but we expect you’ll see at least one:

Broken links The search engines don’t want broken links in their results any more than you do. They will eventually figure out that a page doesn’t exist and remove it from their indexes. But why let a perfectly good search engine ranking go to waste? Try one of the following approaches:

• Since the URL is already indexed and may already have some good rankings, inbound links, or bookmarked traffic, consider creating a new page and saving it at the missing URL. However, do this only if it makes sense to create a new page with similar content it would be awkward if your cabinet hardware products were listed at a page called “floralarrangements. html.”

• Talk to your IT people about setting up a 301 redirect, which carries traffic on this page to another page of your choosing. But don’t make the common mistake of pointing the redirect to your home page! Choose the page on your site that best matches the one that has gone missing.

• Sometimes, broken links linger in the search results because your server fails to mention that the page is missing. That’s right; it’s possible for a server to return a “Page Found” message even if a page is missing! It’s a riddle wrapped in a conundrum, but luckily it’s an easy fix for your IT folks.

Obsolete offerings You don’t want your potential customers seeing outdated product descriptions, promotions that are no longer active, or last year’s price list in the search results. The best and fastest approach to this problem is to update your site’s content while keeping the file in the same location so that it doesn’t lose its search engine status. In some cases, a simple update may not be so simple. For example, suppose you have found a well-ranked search engine listing for your web page featuring the Snackmaster 2004, but your company no longer sells this older model. Your website now has a new page featuring the Snackmaster 2008.

If you rewrite your 2004 page to describe your new product, your site will contain two pages with identical content, which is a search engine no-no as well as an administrative headache. Instead, it’s best to edit the 2004 page content to include a notice that a new model is available and link to the 2008 model page. A 301 redirect would be another option, especially if there’s no customer support or archival reasons to keep the old page live.

Spring Cleaning Your Website for Better Search

We usually advise our clients to add things to their website as part of their SEO strategies keywords, landing pages, more text, more unique descriptions. But, if spring fever has you wanting to toss more than just the moldy contents of your office fridge,we have some ideas for your website.

Here are a few things that you should consider pruning from your site in order to improve your presence in the search engines:

Duplicate content There are two reasons to purge your website of duplicate content. First, the search engines don’t like unnecessary duplication, and second, it’s usually a symptom of a larger organizational problem with your site’s navigation. If your site is displaying identical or nearidentical content on two separate URLs, chances are you’re doing so unnecessarily.

Non-HTML documents that make poor landing pages Think of this scenario: Following a link from a search engine, a visitor enters your site by landing on your PDF product assembly instructions, or a blank financial spreadsheet template. As You know earlier this month, non-HTML documents are often poor entry pages to a website. Sometimes, spring cleaning involves hiding things away from public view, maybe stashing them in a closet or storage bin. In this case, the offending files could be added to your robots.txt file so that they are hidden from search engine indexing.You might need these documents on your website, but you don’t need to offer them as potential landing pages.

“Strategic” outlinks Maybe you followed someone’s outdated advice and took part in a reciprocal linking scheme, or joined an “undetectable” link exchange network.You were only trying to help your website,we know, but these links can be damaging to your site’s ranks, especially if they are pointing to websites that have nothing to do with your own site’s topical focus. Deep-six that “link partners” page! Instead, collect your inlinks in a way that’s more beneficial to your site by creating great content and making sure other sites know about it!

Outdated content Almost every website has outdated content, ranging from little stuff (like old calendars) to big stuff (like obsolete product lines).The problem with outdated content is that it can make its way into your search engine listings and that can cause confusion, frustration, or even a bad reputation for your company. Does your footer say,“ZappyCo: Copyright 2005?”You won’t believe how many times copyright notices show up in search results. Are you displaying promotions that are no longer valid? Don’t play bait-and-switch with your search traffic chances are those visitors won’t come back. Make it a priority, and make some time to update or redirect that dusty old content.

Whatever’s causing your slow pages to load so slowly There are various opinions on how slow is too slow. Some say frustration kicks in for visitors after just one second of load time, and many agree that abandonment is likely after 5–10 seconds of loading. The faster your load time, the less chance that your search traffic will move down the listings to your competitor.There are page-loadtime analysis tools like the one from www.websiteoptimization.com that can help you figure out what might be causing the problem.Toss out the heavy stuff, and streamline your site’s load time.

Remember, it’s not just the sheer number of pages you have indexed in Google it’s the lusciousness of your listings! Any time of year is a good time to banish the parts of your website that are detracting from your search listings.

Private or inappropriate material There it is, staring out at you from between listing #5 and listing #7: your company’s holiday gift list, with addresses and phone numbers of all your best clients! You need to clean up your act, and fast. Here’s how:

• Remove the page from your site. Or, leave the offending file live, but immediately remove the offending content.

• Then request removal from the search engines (see yourseoplan.com for links to removal URLs).

By leaving the file live but changing the content, you may benefit from a quicker update than if you took down the page altogether. However, you should be aware that a search engine’s cached pages may retain a snapshot of the content for longer than you’re comfortable with, and there are historical web archive sites that may display the content forever. If you have serious legal concerns for example, if you posted a disclaimer that said, “All information on this site is medical advice” rather than “…not medical advice” you can use a copyright search method such as http://copyscape.com to search for instances of your content throughout the Web and seek removal.

While these are all positive steps, in truth there’s little you can do to prevent robots from indexing pages that are live and accessible. If you really do not want pages to be found, secure them behind a password!