Giving Bad News To People
August 29, 2005
I know now how a doctor must feel when she's giving some terminal news to her patient. I just had to do the same in relation to a website that looks like it might have been blacklisted by Google.
We were invited to pitch for a search engine optimisation job recently. When we took a closer look at the backend of the site, we found that the structure of the pages is near to impossible to optimise. The site is managed by a content management system developed by a web design house in Dublin. Instead of including content in the pages, it includes references to other pages where that content lies. And on those pages there are references to content on other pages, and so on. A bit like trying to navigate your way around Tokyo with a map drawn by someone on hallucinogenic drugs!
Another company came on board last year to optimise the site and used doorway pages to do so. A short term solution to a long term problem. Google despises doorway pages as it deems them to be spam. And rightly so.
What has happened now is that it appears as though the site may have been blacklisted by Google. That is the website equivalent of getting cancer. You do not want that to happen to your site.
So today I had to deliver the bad news that this site is sick and in order to repair it, there is a lot of time consuming work to be done. It did not make me feel good. And it did not make me feel happy to be delivering bad news to a company that has honestly invested fairly large amounts of money into their online presence.
So the moral of this story is - search engine optimisation is a time consuming process. There are no shortcuts to a high ranking. And it does not pay to try to be smarter than Google.
If you have a site that is not getting the rankings it deserves, contact us for an honest appraisal of what we can do for you. You can be assured of a clear response with realistic objectives and targets.