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

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:

$directory = preg_replace('#^/forums/#', '', $_SERVER['REDIRECT_URL']); // Remove original directory  
$querystr = $_SERVER['REDIRECT_QUERY_STRING'];  
if(empty($querystr))  
        $qm = '';  
else  
{  
        $qm = '?';  
        // Renumber  
        $querystr = preg_replace_callback(  
                '#&id=([0-9]+)#',  
                create_function(  
                        '$matches',  
                        'return "&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…