SEO: How I killed a highly successful message board with just ONE mistake (and how you can avoid it)

Posted by admin

September 9, 2007

Do you have any idea how much disregarding basic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rules can cost you? I have the answer and it’s “a lot“. And take my word for it: I am not an SEO consultant and have nothing to sell, here.

Up until last year, one of my sites was wildly popular: militate.com. Note that after achieving success through word of mouth, it plateaued and never exceeded 300 simultaneous users. It even started a slow descent that would end up in its much smaller audience today.

What was the horrible mistake that lead to that, then?

Simple.

Rule #1 of SEO: when you’re getting good Google juice through heavy pages indexing, do not, under any circumstance, turn your site into a dead links farm.

And that’s exactly what I did: at first people could access the site under a directory labeled /forums; after its first overhaul it became /site; later on I changed the domain name. And finally I changed /site to simply /

This, alone, is no crime. But I never told Google where to find the pages that were being relocated.

As a result, a web site that had steadily grown to more than 600,000 topics suddenly stalled and withered. OK, there are more factors: the site team was losing interest in its main topic, among many. But even when this happens, you can keep a niche site likes this one through sheer popularity. You really have to be a hairless monkey to mess that up.

So, how do you avoid such an unfortunate situation?

In my case, here is what I should have done. This relies entirely on issuing a status ‘301′, which search engines understand to mean “This is my new home. Follow me!”

Solution #1: use ~~mod_rewrite~~ Redirect
This is the usual answer and it works fairly well. Let’s see how we do it for our move from forums/ to site/

1. Create a file called .htaccess at the root of your old directory ( “forums” ) and put the following inside:
RewriteEngine on RewriteBase / RewriteRule /forums/(.*) /site/$1 [R=301,L]

Oh, wait: it is now as simple as

RedirectMatch 301 /forums/(.*) /site/$1

2. That’s it. Make sure that .htaccess has the correct access rights.

Well, that was easy.

Now, let’s say that you are looking for a more advanced solution; for instance you change your CMS/Forum Software and what used to be /forums/index.php?act=topic&page=105&p=1 now becomes /site/index.php?act=topic&n=1&p=1 because your old software’s topics started at number 105 but now that you imported them in your new software, they were renumbered and start at 1.

Here is a simple solution, that will also work if you do not have mod_rewrite (sorry, only a php example for now; I may write a Ruby example as well if requested):

1. Create a file called notarealpage.php; again at the root of your old directory:

^?View Code HTML

[?
$directory = preg_replace('#^/forums/#', '', $_SERVER['REDIRECT_URL']); // Remove original directory
$querystr = $_SERVER['REDIRECT_QUERY_STRING'];
if(empty($querystr))
        $qm = '';
else
{
        $qm = '?';
        // Renumber
        $querystr = preg_replace_callback(
                '#&amp;id=([0-9]+)#',
                create_function(
                        '$matches',
                        'return "&amp;n=" . ($matches[1]-104);'),
                $querystr);
}
$newurl = '/site/' . $directory . $qm . $querystr;
print $newurl;
?]

2. In your .htaccess file, simply put:

ErrorDocument 404 /forums/notarealpage.php

Voila! Simple as that.

A note: again, I recommend that you look at the ‘Plain Code’ since the highlighter plug-in translates all html entities. I have to take this plug-in apart someday…

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Comments

Comment by Joydaymoows on October 29, 2008 @ 9:44 pm

Is that a new way? I like to flaunt my slowly monk I have a good fresh joke for you! Why did the garbage look sad? Because it was down in the dumps.

SEO: How I killed a highly successful message board with just ONE mistake (and how you can avoid it)

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