This document outlines an agenda for a SEO disaster prevention and recovery training session. It discusses identifying areas within an organization that could negatively impact SEO, such as other departments' initiatives. It provides strategies for plugging SEO holes, including checklists for development and QA teams. Processes for disaster prevention are proposed, like daily standup meetings and defining roles and responsibilities. Methods for disaster recovery are also presented, like using analytics and link analysis tools to diagnose issues. The training includes breakout sessions and sharing of SEO horror stories.

1. SEO Disaster Prevention & Recovery
PubCon Las Vegas 2013 – Masters Training - Allison Fabella

2. INTRODUCTIONS
 Allison Fabella (@alli12)
 Director of SEO & Social Media – Primedia (RentPath)
 Manager SEO & Social Media – Atlanta Journal-Constitution
 Sr. SEO Manager – Primedia
 Account Manager – Prominent Placement agency
 And you are…?
 Your name
 Your company
 Your role/position
 What you hope to come away with from this session

3. AGENDA
1.
Introductions
6.
Bio Break
2.
Goals
7.
3.
Case study
DEFCON 2: Pre- and postdevelopment release
 + Breakout
4.
Danger lurking in your
organization
 + Breakout
8.
Disaster recovery
 + Breakout
5.
Plugging SEO holes in your
organization
 + Breakout
9.
SEO horror stories
10.
Discussion / Q & A
6.
Disaster prevention processes
 + Breakout

4. GOALS
1. Know how do identify areas within your
organization that may be SEO killers
2. Arm yourself with a process to ensure successful
SEO initiatives from inception to completion
3. Be prepared with an action plan to quickly
recover if “the worst” happens anyway

5. CASE STUDY

6. THE FALL

7. ACTIONS
 Diagnostic site audit
 Focus on release dates
 Reviewed Google WMT
 Reviewed backlinks
 Reviewed SEO initiatives
 Compared to Panda &
Penguin updates
 Reviewed Product & Dev
initiatives
 Asked questions

8. THE RECOVERY

9. LEARNINGS
 No one smoking gun. Just a series of
development mistakes, residual spammy SEO
tactics, etc.
 Contributors were:
 Poor communication around a major platform
change
 Overall poor/thin quality content
 Dupe titles & meta descriptions
 Malformed canonicals
 Bad URLs pulled into XML sitemap and fed to Google
 Accidental global NOINDEX

10. QUESTION:
What else could have been done?

11. SECTION 1
Danger lurking in your organization

12. THINGS THAT CAN MESS YOU UP
 Other departments’ initiatives
 Infrastructure changes
 Product
 Taking servers offline
 Development
 Data center changes
 Design
 Content
 Ad sales
 Development releases
 Development initiatives
 Code changes
 Platform changes
 CMS changes

13. BREAK OUT - 1
1. Where does danger lurk in your organization
2. What can trip you up?
3. Who are the usual suspects?

14. SECTION 2
Plugging SEO holes in your organization

15. DOCUMENTATION +
COMMUNICATION
 Document primary SEO directives
 Distribute to development, product, and QA
 Discuss with stake holders
 Document primary SEO do’s and don’t’s
 Distribute to dev, product, QA, content, design
 Discuss with stake holders
 Document primary SEO touch points
 Planning, requirements, wireframes, architecture, QA...
 Discuss with stake holders
 Document status updates
 cc all stakeholders

16. PAGE TYPES + DIRECTIVES

17. CHECKLISTS
 For development
 For QA
 For Content
 SEO
 Recommended reading:
 Checklist Manifesto
 Atul Gawande

18. DEV CHECKLIST

19. QA CHECKLIST

20. BREAK OUT - 2
1. What can you do to plug the SEO holes in
your organization?

21. SECTION 3
Disaster-prevention processes

22. PROCESSES
 Daily / weekly meetings & check-ins
 Clearly defined roles and responsibilities
 Including when in the process actions to be taken
 SEO task list
 Starting or restarting your organization’s
commitment to SEO

23. DAILY / WEEKLY
 Attend daily stand-ups (or equivalent)
 Create SEO task list with SEO team for status & additions
 Review weekly
 Hold weekly SEO meetings
 Include all stakeholders
 Development, Product, Infra, C-Suite (at least send them an
invite)
 The higher up the food-chain, the better
 Review
 Current initiatives & their status
 Completed initiatives
 Roadblocks
 Successes (everyone loves a graph)

24. ROLES & RESPONSIBILITIES

25. SEO TASK LIST

26. SEO KICK-OFF OR RE-SET SUMMIT
 Make it a big deal
 One to two days
 Serve food!
 Review all current initiatives
 Discuss roadblocks
 Invite ALL stakeholders
 Dev, Product, Content, Infra, Desi
gn,
 Invite these depts’ supervisors tool
 Create an SEO “wish list”
 Ask top exec to kickoff
 End summit with an action plan
 Assign roles & responsibilities
 Sets the tone
 Adds importance
 Blue sky
 No ideas are bad
 Put follow-up meeting on
calendar by Summit’s end
 Get stakeholder agreement on
attendance

27. SEO KICK-OFF OR RE-SET SUMMIT
 Make it a big deal
 One to two days
 Serve food
 Invite ALL stakeholders
 Dev, Product, Content, Infra, Design,
 And their supervisors/team
leaders too
 Mandatory attendance (if possible)
 Ask top brass to kickoff
 As high up food chain as possible
 Sets the tone
 Adds importance
 Review all current initiatives
 Discuss roadblocks
 Discuss solutions
 Brainstorm an SEO “wish list”
 Blue sky
 No ideas are bad
 End summit with an action plan
 Assign roles & responsibilities
 Put follow-up meeting on
calendar by Summit’s end
 Get stakeholder commitment
to attend

28. BREAK OUT - 3
1. Document your own SEO process
2. Define/assign roles & responsibilities

29. SECTION 4
DEFCON 2: Pre & post- development release

30. PRE-FLIGHT CHECK
 Document current meta robots
 SEO team, dev team, and QA should all have this
documentation
 Document current title tags, meta descriptions,
canonicals, h-tags, size count, word count,
robots.txt, etc.
 Run a crawl test in QA or staging environment
 Ideally via an internal spider
 Screaming Frog will do
 Check current and QA/staging directives for
changes

31. CRAWL TEST: CURRENT IN PROD

32. CRAWL TEST: IN QA / STAGING

33. POST-FLIGHT CHECK
 Immediately after release run crawl test again
 This time in production
 Review each SEO “story” for proper execution
per requirements

34. CRAWL TEST: PRE-RELASE IN PROD

35. CRAWL TEST: POST-RELASE IN PROD

36. BREAK OUT - 4
1. Where are the holes in your organization?
2. What can you do to plug them up?

37. SECTION 5
Disaster recovery: If the worst happens

38. INTO ACTION
1. Identify date(s) of when things went wrong
 Was it a sudden drop or slow decline?
 Sudden drop could indicate site blockage or search
engine manual action
 Slow decline could indicate multiple issues that need
to be identified, prioritized, and fixed
2. SEO Disaster Checklist
3. Recovery

39. DISASTER CHECKLIST
 Analytics diagnostics dashboard
 Already set up & ready to go
 Don’t wait to set up when disaster
strikes. You need to be ready to act.
 Review developer logs
 Review past releases
 SEO, Product, Dev, Etc.
 HTTP status codes
 Server issues
 Robots.txt
 Meta robots
 Inadvertent NOINDEX?
 Bad redirects
 Review Google WMT
 Manual actions
 Crawl errors
 Indexing changes
 Broken/malformed sitemaps
 Malformed canonicals
 Review backlinks
 Any big changes?
 Any “bad” links?
 Past link farming impact?
 Is negative SEO as possibility?
 Panda & Penguin correlations

40. SEO DIAGNOSTIC TOOLS
 Webmaster Tools*
 Google analytics*
 SearchMetrics
 Adobe Site Catalyst
 Moz*
 Frobee Robots.txt Checker*
 SEMRush
 Chartelligence*
 Majestic SEO
 Screaming Frog / Xenu Link
Sleuth
 Internet Marketing Ninjas*
 Link Detox (Link Research
Tools)
 *Free or free version available
 Rex Swain HTTP Checker*
 Favorites to add???

41. GETTING BACK ON TRACK
 Prioritize fixes
 Biggest bang for the buck
 If manual action required
 Be contrite and grovel for forgiveness from engines
 Even if it’s not your fault
 Manage expectations with management around
recovery time
 It often takes a lot longer to get out of trouble than
into it

42. AFTER THE STORM
 Document the issue in great detail
 Document the fix in great detail
 Share this info with stakeholders
 But don’t throw anyone under the bus
 Keep this info on file FOREVER!
 How long?.... FOREVER!!!

43. BREAK OUT - 5
1. What other diagnostics can you check?
2. What are your favorite diagnostic tools?

44. SECTION 6
SEO horror stories

45. BREAK OUT - 6
1. Share your favorite SEO horror story
•
What would you have done differently?
•
What would you have done instead?
2. Or tell about “a friend’s” SEO horror story

46. WHAT ELSE?
Questions? Thoughts? insights?

47. THANK YOU.
Allison Fabella
afabella@rentpath.com
@alli12