Save Your URLs

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.