When Web Design Gets Dangerous

Adam Audette is the president of AudetteMedia, Inc. In addition to helping companies like Zappos implement cutting-edge SEO, Adam speaks regularly at search conferences. You can follow him on Twitter as @audette, and find out more about his company's services right here.

all posts by Adam Audette »

Here’s a theoretical question: what happens when a (very expensive) web design and development shop is ignorant of search engine optimization (SEO)? Answer: they seriously hurt their client’s online business. Or even worse, they kill it (temporarily, let’s hope).

Okay, maybe that’s overstated a bit. But then again, maybe not. Read on…

This post outlines the consequences of web development done without some (pretty basic) knowledge of SEO. It is not meant to “out” anyone or firm, and it’s not meant to demean another party in order to make us look better. That’s not how we operate. What it IS meant to do, is illustrate the serious consequences of web design shops that don’t know (or care to know) SEO.

The facts

First let’s lay out the facts in this situation (the details have been slightly changed to protect all parties; and please don’t go looking for who this could be on our Portfolio page - we don’t list them there - we don’t list one half of our clients on that page).

There are some amazing web design shops out there. But there are some scary ones, too. This post is solely meant to illustrate the consequences of SEO ignorance, in the context of web design firms ~~under~~serving large companies.

The client (a big company with a lot of stakeholders)

• A large publicly traded Fortune 500

• Several brands with ecommerce sites

• Annual revenues in the billions

The agency (a decent design firm but with nonexistent SEO)

• A large design firm

• Fairly solid technology

• Clients are very large companies

• Almost zero knowledge of SEO

The situation

• Sites were being re-designed and re-launched

• A complete strategy was developed for redirecting legacy URLs

• They were behind on a number of initiatives, and SEO was pushed down

The major fail

• 99% of the redirects were not set up properly (and most of the URLs changed)

• Thousands of URLs broke and were returning “page not found”

• When a page wasn’t found, it was 301′d to an error page

• The error page returned a 200 status code

… cue meaningful silence …

Let’s break it down

There are some serious consequences here. Let’s quickly analyze what happened.

Terminal output showing the redirect status codes

Because redirects were not properly in place, and because most of the URLs changed when the new designs rolled out, there were literally tens of thousands of broken links upon launch (across several sites). These broken links were delivered an error page (okay so far - not ideal - but okay), but the error page returned a status code of 200 (all’s well, page found). Whoops.

That’s not even that big of a deal, and an easy fix. The gotcha here is that links were being permanently redirected with a 301 to the error page, which returned a 200.

The sequence:

• tens of thousands of pages were permanently redirected to an error page

• the search engines were told to permanently update the links on these domains to point to the new target - a 404 not found page

• the 404 page gave a status code of 200

So googlebot and bing and slurp were all told: “these pages have been permanently redirected to a new location. Please update them in your engines. The new location is our error page, which pretends it’s not an error page.”

If the error page returned a correct 404 status code, the engines would have known not to update links to the error page. But, because the error page returned a 200, that didn’t happen and tens of thousands of URLs began the process of 301′ing to the error page. Ouch! Major revenue impact!

What can we learn?

So what is there to learn from all this? At a minimum, this situation illustrates that knowledge of SEO is critical for anyone running a web design/development firm. But I would argue that this isn’t even SEO — it’s basic web 101. To think that companies are operating without this knowledge, and doing their clients real harm, is a little scary.

Everyone makes mistakes. I make plenty of them. But I try not to charge my clients vast sums of money for my errors.

Be careful out there.

August 27th, 2009 1:00 am

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Nicely done … it’s the agencies that are open to admitting that they don’t know it all that will evolve and grow. Do you think it’s arrogance or ignorance? I mean I have seen where it’s strictly budget, but keeping those inbound links alive seems like something you should find room for in the budget!

Hopefully, it’s ok to share, but I had a similar post about an agency we ran into that was solely pushing PPC to a client:

Pros and Cons of Pay Per Click

Said Arif Gangji on August 26th, 2009 at 5:24 pm

Adam Audette says...

Thanks Arif. If I’m being honest, I’d say there’s a lot of arrogance in this equation. Which sort of creates or motivates their ignorance of SEO.

Thanks for the link — good points in that post.

Spoken wisely on August 27th, 2009 at 8:38 am

Our client base is different but we find ourselves in similar situations all the time. Someone gets their site re-designed and then they come to us for SEO and there’s a lot of work to be done - A lot that could have been avoided if only they had included someone with SEO knowledge right from the beginning.

Said Leanne on August 27th, 2009 at 9:02 am

Hi Adam. Any chance you can get to the management level on this and learn what went down when schedules and budgets were crunched? That’d be interesting….

When faced with “website ready on time, or ready as per SEO plans” which one should be selected? Why?

After a project advances with some aspects tabled, who returns to those tabled issues? Was a priority ever acknowledged? In other words, was risk ever managed?

I find much of the online SEO advice lacking when it comes to real-world practicalities. I always fall back into risk management mode when working on projects. It seems to be a common thread all of the (often competing) parties can understand. It might be enlightening to learn what really happened here when someone had to make decisions..although it might not be wise to study a client project in public to that level of detail(!)

Said john andrews on August 27th, 2009 at 10:46 am

Adam Audette says...

Indeed John, great points and definitely the ‘meat’ of the matter here. I’m a little scared of publishing too much (sensitive to parties involved), but I agree would be great to see more real-world stuff on SEO blogs generally. I’ll keep that in mind myself.

Spoken wisely on August 27th, 2009 at 3:43 pm

Really a nice post and all the points you have taken are valid.I am totally agree to see more real-world stuff on SEO blogs.Nice information .

Said SeoNext on August 29th, 2009 at 3:31 am

In our business we’ve always tried to communicate to clients that their is essentially two important processes to having a presence online. One being a high quality website, and two, ensuring people can find it and that it actually brings in business - which of course we offer Search Engine Optimization services for.

It’s all too true though, not only are a lot of clients naive, but the design businesses are also.

Said Creare Web Designers on September 3rd, 2009 at 11:56 pm