We have a winner for the quiz on how Centro screwed up the purchase of Real Cities by not talking to a SEO professional first. Actually we have multiple winners.
Shane identified that Centro neglected to redirect a large number of subpages from RealCities.com
Shimon noted that Centro is doing a funky chain redirect – a 301 from http://realcities.com to http://www.centro.net/realcities then a 302(!) to http://www.centro.net/realcities/
While the damage is likely not permanent, and it may be that the RealCities pages had very little SEO value to start (although I doubt that’s the case), this is classic case of how SEO should be a part of any M&A deal. An uninformed buyer could lose a huge amount of value overnight by making these kind of easy to avoid mistakes.
Shane and Simon please ping me with your link requests. And Centro please ping me if you want help fixing your problem 🙂
One Response Comment
Thanks! I sent you an email with the info.
I checked the cached versions of their pages and managed to come across their advertising information. Supposedly they got 44 million monthly visits? I imagine that’s to their “network”. Compete.com shows more likely numbers ending up around 20k visitors in a month. Either way, that’s a large amount of traffic to just turn away.
Crazy!