Day Debt

It is one thing to presume that you know you’re doing when it comes to SEO and it’s another to actual know for sure.

As a partial interest, I read a lot of resources online and learn about SEO. Allot of blogs talk about the importance of title title tags and meta tags, how to create hotlinks in a website properly, best practices and so fourth.

So, I figured, I could easily implement a few tactics by myself and started experimenting with our corporate website.

My first notion was what does a computer nerd know? that I don’t know, right. Our site is a really popular site in our neck of the woods; we have a dependable foundation of visitors and were investigating ways to improve our natural search engine traffic. This is where things took a turn for the worst.

The distinction between theory and practical application is vast; we figured we could apply a few of the things we read about on implementing 301 redirects using the .htaccess file.

Just so you know, if any of you reading this get an inclination to to implement changes on their own, heed the warning of someone who made that same assumption, just don’t.

Turns out in an attempt to execute the mod rewrite, we flubbed the syntax and as a result most valuable pages suffered from a redirect loop from the non canonical version of our site and ended up losing some of our pages in Google.

Supposedly this happens when more than one variant of a page as a result of duplicate content issues and the search engine just chooses one over the other.

In either case, we mishandled the redirect poorly which ended up costing us time, energy and sales from our excursion into unchartered SEO territory.

Luckily, we were able to locate a respected search engine optimization company who helped us fix the problem and showed us the proper way to implement things, in the event that we wanted to muck around again.

Another thing we discovered was the importance of protocol, making backups, not changing too many variables and once and how to log changes with a process map to keep your code in order.

If, or when something breaks, you need to know how to restore it to how it was or create some type of work-around until you can find a long-term solution.

The moral behind the story is, what you learn on-line can be educational and fascinating, but, there is a reason why people are experts in their field.

So, before you simply dismiss something like SEO and dawn your wrenches with the DIY attitude, be aware for every action, there is an equal of greater reaction.

In this instance, it was our site splitting itself up so, be cautious with the .htaccess file and its best left to real SEO’s , so you can focus on your own business instead.