We cover five spectacular SEO disasters and how to avoid them. Join Colin Eggleston and Steven van Vessum from Content King as we show you how to stop a catastrophe before it starts.

1. Page One Power Webinar
Five SEO Disasters
(and how to avoid
them)

2. Today’s
Panel
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3. Colin
EgglestonMarketing Events Coordinator
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r

4. ● 3 years in-house + 8 years
agency
● Chief Customer Officer at
ContentKing
● Real-time SEO Auditing Change
Tracking
● (SEO time machine)
Steven van
Vessum
@Stevenvvessum #p1pwebinar
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5. Question & Answer
Submit your question(s) throughout
the presentation by using
the control panel Questions
tab.

6. Topic of the day:
Five devastating on-page SEO issues
that could have been avoided (and
how to fix them).
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7. Background information
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8. Reality in SEO
Things go wrong,
and you find out too
late.
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9. Reality in SEO
People make technical and
content changes (without telling
you).
How do you manage this?
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10. Our solution to this
problem
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11. ContentKing
We monitor 20 million URLs / day for
issues and changes. Ever up-to-date
crawl data, on-page changes and
issues.
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12. The five biggest on-page SEO disasters
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13. #1 - Canonicalization gone wrong
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14. Situation
Website had duplicate content
issues.
Canonical URL wasn't used, so
they decided to add it.
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15. Canonical URL referencing homepage
was added to all pages.
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What happened

16. Canonical URL is a strong signal to drop
canonicalized pages from the index.
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Problem with this

17. Problem with this fix
Home
Page Page Page Page Page Page
Removed from Google
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18. Result and detection
Within 3 weeks 20% of the pages
were removed from Google. Organic
traffic went down 40%.
Signed up for ContentKing, found
issue right away.
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19. Implemented fix
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Canonicalized pages that were
causing duplicate content. Other
pages had canonical URL referencing
itself.
More info: https://www.becontentking.nl/academy/canonical/

20. #2 - Meta robots settings overwritten
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21. Staging environment shouldn’t
be indexed, so contains site-
wide
<meta name ="robots" content="noindex,
nofollow">
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Situation

22. What happened
This time, meta robots noindex
directive was accidentally moved over
from staging to production
environment.
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23. “Hi search engines!
I strongly recommend you remove all my
pages.”
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Problem with this

24. Result and detection
Agency had website in ContentKing,
found out within 20 minutes
because accessibility issues went
through the roof.
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25. Meta robots settings were adjusted to
reflect previous state.
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Implemented fix
More info: https://www.contentkingapp.com/academy/meta-robots-tag/

26. #3 - Meta information overwritten
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27. Magento upgrade required. SEO plugin
had to be updated too.
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Situation

28. What happened
Agency upgraded Magento, removed
old SEO plugin, installed new version
and released with default templates.
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29. Problem with this
Replaced carefully crafted title and
meta description for 40,000 products
to dummy content.
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30. Result and detection
Organic traffic dropped significantly.
Found changes using Tracked
Changes feature in ContentKing.
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31. Meta information settings were
adjusted to reflect previous state.
(organic traffic still not fully recovered)
Implemented fix
More info:
More info to separate sli-deh?ttps://www.contentkingapp.com/academy/title-tag/ and
- https://www.contentkingapp.com/academy/meta-description/
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32. #4 - Redirection mistake
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33. Situation
4 website multi-language setup.
Friday afternoon 5 PM. Dev pushes
update to add some 301-redirects.
Then opens a beer and celebrates
weekend.
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34. What happened
Dev’s redirect change accidentally
redirects websites 2, 3 and 4 to
website
1.
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35. Problem with this
301-redirect signals permanently
moved content. Essentially merging all
4 websites into one.
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36. Problem with this
Website 1
Website 2 Website 3
Permanently moved, removed from Google.
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Website 4

37. Customer logs into ContentKing website
on Monday, checks changes and sees
thousands of redirects.
Result and detection
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38. Implemented fix
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Dev reverts redirect changes
(luckily in time before search
engines
processed redirects)
More info:
- https://www.contentkingapp.com/academy/redirects/

39. #5 - New website launched without migration
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40. New website is launched. After months
of hard work, everyone celebrates.
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Situation

41. URL migration was done, redirects
prepared but never implemented.
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What happened

42. Problem with this
Lots of changes to URLs, majority of
visitors and search engines ended up on
404-pages leading to hit in revenue,
and not passing authority.
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43. Problem with this
Webpage 1
Webpage 2 Webpage 3
Permanently moved, removed from Google.
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Webpage 4

44. Result and detection
Customer received email during
celebration that ContentKing detected
a huge increase of 404-pages.
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45. Implemented fix
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Dev implements already prepared
redirects (and continue
celebration).
More info:
- https://www.contentkingapp.com/academy/redirects/

46. Poll
Question!
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47. Question &
Answer
Submit your questions now by using the
Questions tab on your control panel.
*all images courtesy of Unsplash.com or wikimedia commons unless otherwise noted

48. Parting Thoughts
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49. • Assume things go wrong.
• Accept that you miss at least some of
it.
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Murphy’s law

50. Do you monitor your baby?
Does your system
administrator monitor his
servers?
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Monitor what you care about

51. If you care about your website,
monitor for issues and
changes.
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Monitor what you care about

52. Thank you for joining us.
info@pageonepower.com / @pageonepower / 208-229-7046