SEO Horror Stories: Cautionary Tales Interview With David

As the spooky season draws to a close, scary movies might not be the only thing keeping you up at night this Halloween. SEO is a constant online marketing effort that requires consistency and adaptation to outperform your competitors and hit the top spot on Google!

When done right, you will be crowned Halloween royalty of the rankings, but it’s not as skele-fun when your SEO efforts aren’t delivering the treats you deserve.

We sat down with our Head of SEO, David Farmer, who shared his most frightful SEO horror stories and some expert ghoul-busting tips to ensure your rankings are a Scream for all the right reasons!

So David, What Constitutes An SEO Horror Story?

An SEO horror story is anything that makes the guilty parties’ spines shiver with dread when they realise what they’ve done. That’s not to say someone is always there to blame directly – some things happen through a Series of Unfortunate Events – but someone takes ownership, and if it makes them feel queasy, then I think we’ve ticked the box for an SEO horror story.

What Have You Seen During An Audit That Has Sent Shivers Down Your Spine?

A few months ago, we had a long-standing client who came to us with a live website with great ranking positions and wanted to know why certain pages weren’t performing as well as others. This should have been a simple enough task; we knew the client’s business well, we’d already helped them to dominate Google for a monopoly of different search terms, and we’d advised their team previously on some great on-page changes.

Little did we know what horrors we were about to uncover…

On the first day, all was in hand. We were benchmarking the low-performance pages against the client’s own high-performance pages and external competitors’ URLs. Technically everything was perfect. It passed all crawlability, indexing, and core web vitals tests, and the content was also great, unique, not plagiarised externally, and had a great flow for UX and bots to digest (semantic HTML, the lot!).

We did, however, find that the new pages simply had no backlinks – so we started placing some targeting linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. to the new content to improve its authority using our Blogger Outreach services. The client walked away happy with the plan, and we agreed to check back in with them in 30 days…

During this time, their developer had accidentally published a series of changes to the website and accidentally checked the infamous WordPress checkbox to ‘discourage search engines from indexing this site.’

Scary! What happened?

Fortunately, the WordPress’ noindex’ checkbox was only ticked for around 15 days. We checked on the campaign mid-way through the plan to make sure all was in order – but they were negatively affected by this mistake

In the month that followed, the client saw:

• 12 of their long-standing top-performing keywords drop out of the top 3 places in Google (the other 75, fortunately, remained unchanged)
• 90 of 500 keywords drop out of the top 10 (again 410 remaining unchanged)
• A loss of nearly 20% in organic trafficOrganic search traffic (sometimes called natural or unpaid search) is the traffic that's driven to a website because of unpaid placement on a search engine results page.

… so not a complete disaster, but never-the-less a ghoulish nightmare.

As soon as we realised the issue, our top priority was to get Google to recrawl as many pages as possible so it understands that they’re now indexable again.

We were straight into Google Search Console, re-submitting the XML sitemapA site map is a list of pages on your site and their relative importance. Use sitemaps to make it easier for visitors to find what they're looking for, and to ensure that search engines can find all the information they need. and Requesting Indexing, Inspecting, and Testing Live URLs, to ensure they’re all as they should be.

The client’s fortunes turned around in 2 calendar months, and they’re now performing better than at the start, thanks to additional Link BuildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs. in the interim.

Tell Us, What Are The First Steps You Take When Investigating A Site That Is Experiencing Rankings Issues?

Before going into full SEO Ghost Busters mode, there are some core steps we take to identify the cause of rankings issues:

1. Check crawlability: Looking specifically at whether all content can be reached by bots, using Screeching Screaming Frog to simulate this.
2. Check indexability: Looking at Google Search Console to make sure the correct number of pages are indexed vs what we’re submitting in the XML sitemap.
3. Check Core Web Vitals: Checking to see if any recent website changes have had a detrimental effect on page speeds.
4. Check Ahrefs: Looking to see if there has been a sudden surge or loss in backlinks/referring domains.
5. Check on-page content and presentation: Has anything significantly changed with the on-site content, HTML markup, or website structure?
6. Check internal linking: Finding out if pages have been removed from navigation areas or have internal contextual links changed.
7. Check the competition: Have competitors simply stolen places through their own SEO efforts?

What Is The Worst Technical SEO You Have Ever Seen?

The worst website build I’ve seen was a full ajax driven/javascript website that was only accessible through the domain nameA domain name is the address of a website and is a necessary part of the process of establishing a web presence.. For users, it provided an interactive user experience; there were transition effects from page to page, dynamic menus, and music playing.

Scarily, there was no SEO fix. The development hours to add browser history as users navigate through pages and to add server-side rendering for bots were just too high. Instead, this website was moved to a non-indexable sub-domain (so it could be kept as a sales aid). A website specifically built for SEO was put in its place on the main domain. Apart from the loss of music playing, the user experiences were similar between both websites.

Please Describe A Time When You Have Seen A Site Hit By A Big Google Penalty?

Remember the evil Penguins?

A few years ago, a client rebranded his business through fear of joining The Lost Boys. He was getting the dreaded “Google has detected a pattern of unnatural, artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site” message in Google Search Console and had a huge drop in organic traffic. They changed their domain name, brand, and logo, reconfigured their website, and then came on board 6 months later to help get the new website moving in the right direction.

The old domain was getting 70k visitors per month before Penguin hit, and the new domain was barely touching 1k at the point of starting the work. It was a long haul to cherry-pick the best of his previous backlinks and reach out to the website owners to get the domain changed.

What Are The Biggest Rankings Drop You Have Fixed?

I’m currently working with 2 clients who are both in very similar positions – they were performing at their peaks in 2019/2020 but have been in a very steady month-on-month decline since.

Both clients suffered massively from crawlability issues – one website could generate 2.2 million URLs in Screaming Frog even though they had only 100k pages. With both clients, there has been a period of technical SEO implementation to prevent the websites from generating these superfluous URLs and correctly set canonical URLs throughout. Both have now stopped the rot, and we’re proactively working to return them to their peak levels.

What’s Your Strategy When It Comes To Investigating Someone’s SEO?

To leave literally no stone unturned and to flush out the technical SEO gremlins! Then build a solid base of quality content and improve the authority of that content with great backlinks.

What Frightful Faux Pas Should Sites Avoid? 

Given recent Google updates – avoid creating multiple pages that have the exact same purpose and content. It’s bad for users as they might read conflicting information on each page if one is not updated, and it’s bad for bots – cannibalisation can kick in, and neither page ranks. Having multiple pages also splits your backlink profile across 2 URLs when 1 URL that specialises in the topic will always perform better.

If you have this issue, the best solution is to combine the 2 pieces into 1 long-form piece of comprehensive content (remember that 10x buzzword last year?) and to 301 redirect301 redirects are permanent, so they only need to be set up once. They can signal to search engines that a page has been permanently moved or removed, which can help boost website traffic in the process. the old (now deleted) page to the live one.

What Should Sites Do To Avoid Living An SEO Horror Story Of Their Own?

Don’t rely solely on robot/AI automated audits – too many new clients come to us with great SEMrush audit scores but poor results. Automated audits often miss the basics, like adding specific pages to capture particular search terms, so work with someone with technical SEO and content marketing experience to understand how to best structure and configure the website and build for the future.

Do You Have Any Other Words Of Caution To Add?

Keep the Final Destination in mind, ignore vanity metrics and focus on enquiries and sales.

Next Steps

Fangs David for taking the time to chat with us for this spooky series!

If your SEO results are more of a horror story than a fairy tale, then book a free consultation with one of our experts today! We are confident that we can give your rankings the boo-st they need!