Just got off the phone with a client who has some serious SEO issues. One of the big ones is that there are ten-year-old URLs still in Google’s index that nobody knew about. These URLs were put in place by people who are no longer at the company, and if I hadn’t done some creative searching, chances are they never would have known about them. Did I mention that these URLs were rendering exact duplicates of the entire site? I am thinking that could be a problem.
So my advice is to set up a document that everyone on the team can access and make someone responsible for updating it with every new URL type that you push live, or even that you push to a dev server (I’ve seen plenty of dev servers that are accessible to the search engine bots). It may not seem like such a big deal right now, but when your traffic tanks and you’ve got your SEO guy on the phone, presenting him/her with this list will likely help you all get to the root of the problem a lot faster, which will mean that you are more likely to have a job by the time the traffic comes back.
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