Legacy Structures, “Open Doors”, and why they are “Bad”
In my day to day work as a Professional SEO I encounter many issues that affect site ranking - one that I have seen at an ever increasing rate is the elusive ‘open door’ page/link issue. We use this term “open door” internally in reference to any ‘link’ or ‘doorway’ to a obsolete page (series of pages) or worse an entire old site taxonomy.
As websites age they redesign themselves (a necessity), create increasingly more complex ‘database driven’ content schemas (as they grow), change CMS systems (as they go obsolete), we have seen a marked increase in duplicate content penalties, dead link penalties, and growing backlink, error 404 page logs to monitor.
We all know in this ever changing web production world taxonomies grow, file/folder structures evolve, naming conventions morph themselves, subdomains are born/expire, and publishing processes differ over time - so what does a SEO do? My answer is simple - be vigilant! Seriously, monitor your clients/project like it was your own house - scan all the backlinks regularly and test the heck out of them yourself. Click on the SERP results for your top converting terms and QA them if you suspect any issues, you never know what the “Tech Department” did last night ;). You may also want to regularly compare the number of pages indexed in each engine (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) to see if you accidentally missed a old link or legacy page which could lead to a former website version to spawn - any large variance in pages indexed (up or down) could indicate a unresolved internal linking issue.
Remember SEO is a “hands on” process, and there is no excuse for taking your eye off the ball - IMHO it is every SEO’s job to do their best for the client and the search engine consumer.
By Jeremy Hermanns | February 9, 2008 | Filed Under SEO Advice
comments
Leave a Reply
-
Sneak Preview #1
-
Sneak Preview #2
-
Support
-
