I was recently contacted by one of my best clients who askedme what I thought of his decision to make a major change toone of his highly ranked pages. His initial concern was thatvisitor sales conversion ratio was low. At almost one percent,it was just below normal, but Im always happy when a clientwants to improve. Conversion and rankings though, are verydifferent beasts and his concern was overly focused on theformer to the total exclusion of the latter.
As his SEO I should have realized that the top rankings ofthis already optimized page were in danger when his firstsentence referred to the existing Dusty, tired old page, thatjust isnt getting enough sales. That page had just beenoptimized for search engines about 6 months previously, andwent from page 10 (invisible) or so of the Search EngineResults Pages (SERPs) to the top three on the first pages ofall three major search engines virtually overnight after a fewtweaks to gain traction from a popular movie reference to hisproduct.
The page had been up for several years before the movierelease without gaining substantial web sales of that sameproduct, but our optimization six months ago lead to a leap insales and consistently improving page visits after thattheatrical release. But sales plateaued over time and slowlydecreased after the movie which had mentioned his producttransitioned to DVD sales. Somehow he hadnt forseen thatdecrease and wanted to continue the level of sales he hadenjoyed while the movie mention was fresh.
To achieve the continued sales though, he wanted to completelyreplace the page text with new material hed been given by themanufacturer of the product. As is the case with marketingmaterial provided by many companies, keyword density wasnon-existent with emphasis was on slick new photos, coveredwith stylized, graphical text. Text with keywords thatcouldnt be repeated in any page text since they had alreadybeen embedded in the image graphics several times.
What to do I suggested creating an entirely NEW page with themanufacturer provided information linked within his site menulinks on each page and from the sitemap. While maintaining theold page for its top rankings in the search engines we couldsimply use internal linking to keep the search enginescrawling that (old dusty) fully optimized page. That way wewould still rank in the top 5 for that page and its covetedkeywords and provide the new conversion focused page to sitevisitors from the menu links.
For some reason though, the client insisted on using theexisting filename for the new content and moving the oldcontent to a NEW filename! Why Because he wouldnt have tohave his programmer change a script which loaded a rotatingbanner to a select few highly trafficked pages. The programmercosts too much to change a few lines of code for a profitableproduct page
This tactic meant that we would completely lose the existingrank on the next visit of the search engine crawlers after thenew page was posted. I was convinced that we could gain therank back, but only over time and with substantial extra work.The cost to the client to get a new page into the top five onSERPs was going to exceed the cost of programming updates ofbanner rotation scripts. But he insisted we use the newmanufacturer provided (image only) content on the oldfilename. OK, I relent.
The web designer wanted to use the new manufacturer providedpage in an iframe and embed the old page text in noframes tags- making it visible to search engines, but not visitors. Sillyidea and borderline spam technique that may drop our top fiverankings off the charts. I dug my heals in and refused thatidea.
The client suggested simply keeping previous metatags andtitle tag to maintain ranking. Sorry, that simply wont work.If it did, wed return to the bad old days of simplistickeyword stuffing in those (no longer) magical metatags. Istarted to wonder ... Am I here as an SEO only to stopdesigners from using SE spamming techniques, programmers fromhaving to write new code and clients from doing absurd keywordstuffing in metatags
No you actually have to use carefully crafted keyword richtext on the visible page - and NOT embedded in graphics filesas text painted across photos with photoshop and illustratorsoftware. Search engines cant read text on images and thatimage Alt text in the HTML is no longer useful in SEO sinceit has been so badly abused by simplistic optimizers forranking gains before the search engines began to ignore it intheir ranking algorithm.
The new page may initially see sales increases due to thepretty new photos (there is zero text on that new page) butafter a long series of email exchanges with this client and afinal phone discussion over ranking issues, he proceeded withthis change anyway. I normally dont hope for poor rankings onclient pages, but since this one runs counter to every fiberof my SEO being, Im actually looking forward to that torpedostriking and the ranking to sink off the charts and the clientto pay attention to his SEOs advice.
The old page is still showing up in cached pages at the searchengines, so they havent yet crawled the new version. I willdutifully point out the sinking of the venerable SS SearchEngine Ranking ship next week when Googlebot revisits thisclient site and finds all that text has disappeared from hispreviously #1 ranked page and suggest to him that he reviewhis WebTrends traffic reports to see that it has settled tothe bottom of the ocean.
I guess I better get busy finding a way to rank the previous(old optimized) page on the brand new shiny filename. Wont hebe surprised to learn that most of his sales come from that(newly named) old dusty page within a few weeks
Copyright September 3, 2005
Have you done anything to torpedo and sink your ship SSSearch Engine Rankings lately Call me at 562-572-9702 if youneed a salvage operation to raise that venerable ship from thebottom of the vast search engine rankings ocean. Mike Banks Valentine operates the article distribution site and a Small Business EcommerceTutorial for Web Entreprenuers at
One thing is for sure, you dont want to spend hours, perhaps days, months, or years on a website to have some stupid little mistake get your site dropped or never even listed in the search engines. There are a lot of rules that search engines have created to block out what they call spammers, so dont kid yourself by telling yourself you are not an evil spammer. As the courts might say, ignorance of the law is no excuse. So what kind of horrific mistake could sneak upon you and possibly ruin all your hard work
When I first starting making web pages, I created basic templates that I used for an entire site. Of course its great to have a uniformed look for your site, but what if you had a screw up on a template you used over and over again. What kind of screw up How about hidden text or a hidden link You see the old WYSIWIG editors, like the older versions of FrontPage sometimes leave behind links within the html code even after youve deleted the link. As far as hidden text, that can happen by not paying attention to what you are doing. If you make hundreds of pages eventually you might accidentally color some of your text the same as your background. You say its not likely. I wouldnt think so either, but its happened to me several times. If you use the mistake ridden template over and over again, you might have a problem. Its generally understood that search engines frown on hidden text and links. How many will they overlook is anybodys guess. So if you havent checked your old web pages, it might be profitable to check out your html code. Look for urls with no link text in the code. You can usually find hidden text by simply highlighting your webpage in your browser.
Solutions
If you find out you have the problem over hundreds or thousands of pages, it might be worth investing in Microsoft FrontPage 2003. It has a split screen that helps in finding html errors, and best of all you can do a site wide search and replace. The software will find the code you search for, and all you have to do is leave the replacement code box blank, thus removing the offending hidden link.
The good news is that there are some other ways to avoid this problem altogether. You can learn CSS for template designs for instance. A trick I like to use is Server Side Includes (SSI) for my links menu. To make it work you have to have two things, a code like this [an error occurred while processing this directive] with your links menu page inside the code, and your server has to be set to take it. Most servers are automatically set to use SSI includes in shtml pages, but most web hosts allow you to pick .html or .htm pages to parse. The only thing to keep in mind is it puts an extra task for the server to perform on each and every page that contains the extension you choose to parse. For example one of my web hosts has in their control panel a apache handler section. I simply go there put server-parsed in the Handler box, .htm in the extension box, and click add. Thats it. Now if I need to add a link to my menu I change one page the menu.htm page and Im done.
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