How to avoid possible SEO disasters? – 5 disasters to stay ahead of
Few companies are prepared for possible disasters concerning their company website. What happens to SEO if the company’s domain is taken over? Or if management decides the name of the website will be changed? Most problems are caused because of carelessness. Employees deleting pages that are important for the findability of the company’s website, for example. A disaster is a situation that causes big implications and correcting them is not easy. Therefore, you should better be prepared for the following four SEO disasters.
SEO disaster 1 – The data center goes down
When the datacenter goes down both search engines and visitors will not be able to reach your website. This can have several causes and maintenance that would usually take one hour will now take days. Or electricity fails because of bad weather conditions. The result: your website cannot be accessed. How to avoid your website from being inaccessible?
Although it is not possible to completely avoid datacenters from going down, the possibility can be decreased by Cloud Computing, a Content Delivery Network or by having other datacenters run copies of your website. As falling-out is not only inevitable but also costly to solve, you should make clear arrangement with the parties involved about what happens in case the datacenter goes down.
SEO disaster 2 – Your domain was taken over
Domains are hacked more regularly than most people think. However, not having paid the bill for a domain is the most common reason for losing it. The solution to this problem is simple: make sure that employees are aware of the update dates of every registered domain. Another often committed error is giving the company’s username and password to strangers.
In case your domain has been taken over by evil minded people, a back-up domain might be your solution. While you direct your customers to a temporary website, you could try to get back your stolen domain.
SEO disaster 3 – The domain will be changed
Management decides to change the name of the company and continue doing business under that name. All too often, the consequences of this change are underestimated. The company has been working really hard to get high rankings with the original company name and suddenly management decides the name of the website needs to be changed.
The best thing to do in this case, is to have a conversation with the responsible person in the company and explain that it will take some time to change the website domain name. and that it might have a negative impact on positions, traffic and sales. To decrease the negative impact, it is recommended to operate the original and the new website at the same time. In this way the new domain name can increase its value. When the results of the new website are satisfying, the original website can be redirected to the new one. One thing to keep in mind: make sure the websites don’t have duplicate content.
SEO disaster 4 – Delete
When updating the company website, you will have to take some things into mind in order to avoid terrible consequences. If there is decided some big changes need to be instituted because the website does not have the right style anymore, probably large pieces of content will be rewritten or even deleted for good. This process drastically influences your SEO.
Although you should encourage improving the website and its content, you should be part of all the processes. In this way you will be able to make sure the pages that will be deleted will get a redirect and that content that will be rewritten will retain the right SEO focus.
Many more possible SEO disasters exist, but these five scenarios might help you to get aware of what could happen to your SEO in certain situations. Prospect Factory can help you improve your SEO, so if you need help with this, don’t hesistate to contact us.
