If you've got loads of pages missing on your website, then it's kind of like saying to the search engines, not just Google. Um, we don't really care much about this website. It's not a very good resource. There's loads of pages missing. So what?
I guess that's the thing, isn't it? I mean, we're talking in this example about somebody who's replatformed from one website to another, but I have, and I'm sure you have before encountered situations where somebody is just kind of like thoughtlessly deleting blog posts they don't like anymore and not bothering to redirect them or give Google any sort of directive that says this has been a deliberate action. And you'll go sometimes into people's Search Console, which is just a bit of Google software that tells you about any kind of back end issues on your website. And you'll see all these four hundred and four errors, and it'll just be because they've been sort of thoughtlessly just deleting content whenever they fancy it. And they just, you know, a lot of people just don't realise how bad that is.
Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Um, I'm probably going to cough while I'm recording today because I'm just getting over a cold.
Sickly, sickly man.
I know your tiny violins out, everybody. Um, we and it's it's a bit of a tickly. Just just disappearing now. So I've got a cup of tea as we chat away, um, expecting this to be quite a short, sharp, succinct, pithy. What a great word. Um, yes, a succinct, not least because we've got like one, um, battery cell left on the, on, on the, on the recording device. So, uh, we.
Like to live dangerously.
Well, I actually, I'm surprised I was, it did have two, but anyway, waffle waffle. Um, we have been busy over the last couple of days on a sort of rescue mission, haven't we? So yeah, we're not going to talk about who the client is. Uh, new client, super bunch of people really excited to have them, uh, to have them on board. Um, delighted to be working with them and kind of almost lucky for us in that they were in a bit of a pickle following, um, replatforming their website and making some fairly, I don't think it's cruel to say fairly fundamental, but fairly common.
Yeah. Well, that's the bit I was going to say. Yeah.
It's uh and so earlier this week, um they were getting quite concerned because they were pretty much day by day watching their valuable rankings that generate good enquiries for their fantastic product.
Any more adjectives?
Uh, no, I've run out. Uh, they were watching those rankings disappear.
They were literally watching them drop off a cliff. Yeah. And I think that's a situation that a lot of people, certainly anybody who's been through a replatforming project will know kind of very intimately, because I think that's the the worry always, isn't it, is that you will just change your website over. And from the day you've changed your website over, you'll log into Search Console or analytics and just watch those rankings and those that traffic sort of nosedive.
Yeah. You know, it's bad enough watching rankings struggling, um, because of Google updates or because you've neglected your site, you haven't been adding great content for a while. You've kind of been busy on other things. It's bad enough watching rankings disappear as a result of that. But when you know that it's because you've done something and you haven't done it correctly.
Yeah.
Then that's when it stings a bit, isn't it? Yeah. So in essence, um, what they have done is move to a different platform. Again, we're not going to talk about the ins and outs of whatever the platform is, but they've moved from one platform to another. Their content management system changed. So they've moved all their content across in order to have more flexibility going forward, which they will have and have got now. Um, but there's a very simple exercise which sounds geeky. Tell everybody what it is, Alex.
No, because I'll say three oh one and then you'll be like, oh, what's a three oh one reader?
No, I asked you to say it. Three oh one.
Redirect.
Yeah. There is a Wikipedia page, about three hundred one redirect. Yeah, it's perfectly fine. You can find out any information out there. It's effectively like it's effectively like moving house and telling the post office to send all your mail to this new address for the next twelve months in case somebody, you know, in case people still email you at the email, in case people send mail to your old address.
You've forgotten what it's like in the real world.
I know I have. Yeah. Who sends letters anymore? Um, so basically when you change your website and if you change the actual web page addresses, the URLs, um, then you use what's called a three oh one exercise to tell Google the page was this, but now it's this. And you could use the same A principle. If you get rid of content and decide that you've got a page about a subject, and then you've got three other pages which were also about that subject, but didn't really add any value, you can effectively tell Google those three other pages now are now moved to this one single good page about this particular subject. So the three hundred and one exercise is, um, it's very simple. Um, but as we saw with this, uh, with this client, very easy to get it spectacularly wrong as well.
Yeah. So they hadn't done anything particularly bad. I mean, to be honest, it's something I think we've all seen many times before. It's easily done. Um, but basically, like you were saying before, if you don't tell the post office that you've moved address, quite rightly, your mail will get lost. And with them, what they've done is basically with a few of their URLs is not specifically said to Google, this URL has moved to here. So Google is going to the old page finding that it wasn't there and thinking, oh, it's gone. And then Google does something which basically says the page is for or Ford, which is its way of saying, I can't find this page. I'm assuming it's just vanished and you haven't moved it, so I'm going to index it, which means not going to serve it to people anymore when they Google something relevant. Okay.
So let's just put in very plain language for, uh, marketing and business listeners what this stuff means. Because people do get it. They do get themselves tied in knots a little bit. So we've already said there's a thing called a three oh one three zero one, which if you change your website's sorry, a web pages address from red evolution dot com forward slash page dot HTML to red evolution dot com forward slash page dot HTML. You basically set up a three hundred one which says it was called page dot HTML. It's now called page dot HTML. That means that first of all, Google, you're telling Google you've moved it and the three hundred one means permanently moved. There is a three or two, which is a temporary redirect, which let's not really talk about that. You know, not many confusing.
There's enough numbers in this. There are.
So basically you've got this three or one. And the good thing is when you do a three or one, if a page has particularly good rankings.
They will just normally just transfer straight away.
Normally they will. Yeah, they will be passed over to the new page. So but you know, but the primary thing to remember with this is that if you're changing web page addresses, make sure you do three or ones so that your website doesn't lose those great rankings. It's got, I mentioned three or twos, which are temporary redirects. And we're not going to go into any detail about why you might use those. You've already mentioned another one. This is all very geeky.
We're just going to call this one the one with the numbers. I think it's a four hundred four.
So so tell the ladies and gentlemen about four hundred four.
So this is literally just a code that means can't find this web page doesn't exist as far as I'm concerned, which Google will, in Search Console show you all the pages that you have or had that are now for offering, which is basically just a way of saying, you know, these pages have absolutely vanished. I can't find them. And sometimes that's fine. Like if you. Well, maybe sometimes, sometimes if you do delete something because it was absolute rubbish and you really don't want it associated with your website, it's absolutely fine to see those four hundred four errors served.
My phone ringing again all day.
But it's generally a bad idea. Generally something you do not want to see.
If you are getting rid of a page. And as you just said, you don't want it. You're quite happy that it's not there anymore. Are you sure that you should be doing it with a four hundred four?
No. There's another thing you can do, which is called a four ten, right? Which is like where you tell Google, I've deliberately removed this page. It hasn't gone missing, haven't hidden it, hasn't dropped it behind the sofa. I've actually deliberately removed it. So I guess a four hundred and four is Google's way of saying, you know, you haven't told me what you've done with this page and it's gone. So.
So the four hundred and four thing is worth knowing about. Because if Google's saying there's a page that I have previously known about, I've previously put it in my index and now I can't find it, then you really should understand why it can't find it. And then you need to say you then need to say, actually, we did remove that page and replaced it with another page, in which case tada! We need a.
three hundred one.
Right? But if you've then actually removed it and the intention was to remove it for ten.
Do I get anything you do?
Yeah, absolutely. There will be chocolate.
I'm not so easily bribed. No, I mean, but I think just going back to basics, the the reason that's really important is because always with every website, what Google wants to know is that you are thinking about the things that you're publishing, that you're kind of talking about the same things consistently, that you know what you're doing. What they don't want is people's websites, you know, just having bits of content randomly appear and disappear. That's not a great experience for users, and the last thing they want is for something to be in a search engine results page, and then a user click on it and it four hundred and four, because that's a terrible experience. So if you have pages that are four hundred and four, and Google will very quickly strip them out of the index and you will find that they get no traffic, you lose your rankings, whatever search term they used to rank for. Um, and it is a terrible time really. I mean, like we were talking about the client in question. I mean, they were watching their visibility drop kind of day by day. And okay, that's because several of the pages across their site that used to drive a lot of traffic had started for offering and Google had removed them from the index. But even if it's just one or two pages, you'll still lose a lot of traffic like that. And I think it's fair to say, without kind of personifying it, too much goodwill from Google, because a site that has a lot of four hundred four errors and that sort of thing generally does perform a lot worse in search, doesn't it?
Yeah. So I guess what we're saying is if if you've got loads of pages missing on your website, um, then it's kind of like saying to the search engines, not just Google. Um, we don't really care much about this website. It's not a very good resource. There's loads of pages missing. So what?
Yeah, you may come back tomorrow and find more of our content missing. Who knows? And I guess that's the thing, isn't it? I mean, we're talking in this example about somebody who's replatformed from one website to another, but I have, and I'm sure you have before encountered situations where somebody is just kind of like thoughtlessly deleting blog posts they don't like anymore and not bothering to redirect them or give Google any sort of directive that says this has been a deliberate action. And you'll go sometimes into people's Search Console, which is just a bit of Google software that tells you about any kind of back end issues on your website. And you'll see all these four hundred and four errors, and it will just be because they've been sort of thoughtlessly just deleting content whenever they fancy it. And they just, you know, a lot of people just don't realise how bad that is. But I guess that's sort of why we're doing this, isn't it? Yeah.
That's right. Um, you're right about the, uh, the search console. That's what I've just written down. Just to just just to let people know when we were asked by the client, um, to come on board and start helping them, um, generate more business from the website and then kind of, oh, and by the way, we've just replatformed and our rankings are falling off a cliff. Well, you and I jumped straight on it yesterday, didn't we? And we started a forensic analysis of the website.
We had a look. Yeah.
Where do we look? And very quickly, because of the information in the search console, we were able to establish that pages that had previously ranked really well were now no longer there, because the address of that page had changed when it had been moved to the new content management system, and there was no three or one in place.
Yes. Which I think just to kind of unpick this, because there'll be a lot of people kind of sat there, I imagine, thinking, well, but what if I have these errors? You know, how do I know about it? How do I find out? I mean, literally what we did is went and looked at Search Console, found the pages where the rankings were declining the quickest. And then within Search Console, you can literally just click a little button that tells you, show me how you're indexing this page, show me what you know about it. And Google was saying there, you know, this page is four hundred four. So it's not super difficult once you know what to look for. And it is probably the first thing to check, I guess if you notice that your rankings are declining very rapidly around a specific search term or a specific page, you can just go into Search Console and have a look at you and see for yourself what's happening.
Yeah. I mean, we were sort of really lucky because it was, it was fairly obvious. And we'll probably do a follow up to this podcast because we're fairly confident that with the changes they made were only made just, just, just into the new year. And it's only third, second of February today. So we're thinking that we may have just managed to jump in and get everything knocked into shape in terms of getting all the right three or ones in place, etc.. And, um, and just generally, um, you know, fix things in a way that we expect to see the rankings they had come, come back.
So it is. It is quite time sensitive, isn't it? I think that's an important thing to maybe unpack. Like if you, I guess, lose a load of pages down the back of the sofa and Google find out about it. They, they tell you these pages are four hundred four and we can't find them and you just leave it for years. That's a very different situation then, isn't it?
Yeah, I think so. That's right. Um, okay. So I think I think the thing to remember about this as well is that it really didn't have to happen. Um, I think the company got so wrapped up in moving to this exciting content management system that's going to help them with their whole business growth, digital marketing piece that they kind of overlooked some of the fundamentals. So as well as recognising that there was a bunch of pages which, uh, had had their web address, their address Changed without a corresponding three or one. We also noticed that. They hadn't taken a lot of care over some of the other fundamentals, such as the page title elements. The bit of the web page sounds a bit geeky, I know, but the bit of the web page, your guys, your web guys, your developers, your agency know all about this stuff. But the bit of the web page that gives the search engines the biggest clue about what the page is about.
Much like the title.
Said about.
What.
You did. I wish I hadn't, but.
It's done now. It's committed. Um, no, I mean, yeah, exactly. I mean, so page title element is literally does what it says on the tin, right? It's the title of the page. It tells Google, this is what this page is going to be about. And then there are also like meta descriptions. Or another thing I think that get really overlooked, which is just a little bit of information, again, like a paragraph of information that you give Google and you say, this is what to, you know, this is what this page is about and what to show under the listing on a search engine results page. Yeah, lots of little details, really. And I think, again, you know, just to reiterate with the client in question, it wasn't that they hadn't done any three hundred ones. It's that they'd done them incorrectly. Right?
That's a yeah, they'd missed a Lord, but they'd also done some incorrectly. And there were some of the, some of the new addresses were they were actually wrong as well. They were really long convoluted because I think fundamentally they would focusing on getting the new website up, getting their shiny new website in the shiny new content management system up. And, you know, it's, it's, it is a criticism, but it's not surprising. And they're certainly not alone in doing this. They lost sight of all the important stuff, the under the hood stuff that's, you know, it's it's easy to get it right. And as we've seen with this, and I've already said today, very easy to get it wrong.
Yeah. Part of me feels like, I think I was saying this to you earlier that it's a fault of some cms's. And to be fair, some web platforms too, because I went and had a look at Ahrefs guide to doing three hundred and one redirects, um, earlier today. And like, one of the things I think is maybe part of the problem is that a lot of these places present as a sort of box ticking exercise. It's just like something you should do, but it didn't really explain why or how important it is or what happens if you get it wrong. And I think there's a lot of that in, you know, the kind of the geeky stuff, if you like, is just seen as like, oh, well, I have to do that. But if you don't realise why you're doing it, maybe you don't put quite as much effort or care into it. Yeah, it really is to sort of get it wrong and it can be catastrophic. So yeah.
So this, this certainly got some of these these fundamental things wrong. And, you know, this isn't a podcast about how to optimise a web page, but they hadn't optimised their web pages. They'd kind of, you know, focused on the wrong things. And then there was another one, another thing that we found where one of the things, again, going back to Google Search Console, which is a free tool provided by Google, invaluable, um, is you can feed in what's called a site map, and you're effectively feeding in a file. It's like usually a web address where you say, you're saying to to Google, here is an. Here's a list of all the web pages on my website. And when we looked at that part of the search console for their website, there were. What was there in there?
Like nine or ten, nine or ten sitemaps.
Most of them were obsolete. Yep. So again, it's like they were almost because they were focused on getting this new shiny website live. You know, some of those very simple things they got wrong. And, you know, they're now working with us and we're delighted to have them as a customer. And you know what I would say to anyone who's doing this, by all means, if you if you've got an in-house team or you've got a friendly freelancer who's doing a new website for you, etc., that's all well and good, but speak to somebody who understands the importance of getting all of these quite basic things, right?
Yeah.
Because you will pay the price if you don't. And it's it's so hard in twenty twenty three. It's so hard to get good rankings. It's so hard to get people onto your website unless you're in a really uncompetitive niche, which hardly anybody is. It's so hard, you know, when you've done a lot of the hard yards and you've figured out or not figured out when you've done the hard yards and you've got that traffic and you've got those top five rankings, top ten, top five, top three, number one rankings.
Don't be throwing them away. Don't throw.
Them away. Yeah. Don't throw them away over something you know silly. It's it it just it kind of makes no sense at all.
Yeah. It's interesting as well though, because one of the things that the client in question said that I think is, you know, quite critical is that, you know, this stuff seems obvious to us because we live and breathe it. But if you're not kind of immersed in it, it is, it is, you know, it may as well all be in German, right? I mean, none of this stuff makes a lot of sense unless you're kind of enmeshed in it. And I guess that just goes back to what you were saying before, which is there is never any harm in having somebody check over it, in much the same way that, you know, if you're thinking about adding an extension to your house, you might ask a chartered surveyor to come and double check your plans or something like just get a second opinion, make sure that there is a couple of experts involved in, in overseeing this kind of thing, because otherwise it can go wrong so quickly.
Yes. That's right. Um, there was something incredibly interesting I was going to say there you were waffling on. I say my mind wandered. I just started looking outside because it's quite a nice evening. And then by the time you've stopped talking, I came back and it's gone.
I just some of our listeners may wonder why I'm still involved in this podcast.
Well, I'd be, I'd be, I'd be one of them because I do listen to the podcast and I listen to them and think, why is why is why is he still involved in these podcasts? Um, okay, so that's it all we really wanted to say on this subject. It, it does sound techy. It does sound geeky, but once you know, do not think, oh, you know, I'm just going to bury my head in the sand. My new website looks great. I'm not going to worry about the other stuff. It is not difficult to get the the the fundamentals of moving from one website platform to another, including changing web page addresses, etc. it's not difficult to get it right. You will regret it if you don't get it right.
Yeah, because it is perfectly possible and probably should be the standard that you can do these migration projects without losing any traffic or rankings, right? I mean, absolutely not that you're going to kind of sign up to that, but it shouldn't happen. That's the thing. You can it's perfectly easy in twenty twenty three to just move from one platform to another without losing anything.
So that's right. I mean, in the most extreme, and we've gone through these exercises with clients, you actually change the domain name. For example, if a client completely changes its name and its brand and we've taken some customers on that journey, we finish up buying a brand new domain name. And then we go through the process of doing the three on three or one exercise from, you know, A, B, C dot com to xyz dot com. And you know, even that, you know, you retain the rankings, you do go through a little bit of a ripple, a little bit of a, um, in the, um, in, in the universe. Uh, but, but it's, it's, it's totally doable if you do it right. And it's not hard to get it right. Um, okay. Anything else that we need to think about? Um, going forward with that particular client? Um, we are, you know, we've kind of done the emergency stuff, haven't we? Yeah, we, we, we kind of established what we needed to do, uh, yesterday and then we just, we kind of put two heads on it this morning, you and I, and we went through it and, um, we're now in a kind of holding pattern and kind of like watching and seeing what happens next. But we've, you know, we've, we've kind of undone, undone the damage. At least that's what we're hoping. So we will report back and, and kind of let you know how that, how that's gone, um, going forward will now be, you know, working with them to, you know, just broadly improve the way that the website's generating business for them. And, um, there's, you know, as we did a, I did a, an audit. Yeah, an audit for them. So that's, um, you know, there's a lot of, a lot of the findings from that website audit. And if you want a website audit, just go to red evolution dot com and click the little blue call to action in the top right hand corner. And we'll do a video audit of your website and give you some pointers on how to improve things and potentially get more business from it.
Have you ever have we ever done a podcast about audits? Because I think they're one of the, like most grossly misunderstood things in our industry.
I don't think we have.
We should probably do one at some point. Yeah, I just think they have a weird reputation. Lots of people think an audit is something that you just like get a piece of software to do for you automatically. And that is absolutely.
Well, let's face it. I mean, when some when some organisations, some agencies audit a website, they literally plug it into SEMrush, you know, which is, which is a tool that a lot of agencies like us subscribe to. And it will pump out a seventy page PDF document full of gobbledygook, Gobbledygook. Technical gobbledygook to the non SEO or non-web people. Um, and it's like, ta da! You know, and all that's designed to do is make people go look at it and go, oh, I don't understand this. I better pay somebody a lot of money who does understand it to fix it all for me.
Which for the record, was definitely not the intention of this podcast.
No, no. That's right. Uh, no, I mean, we, we are, you know, I think people realise by now I've been doing this podcast for, for quite some time that, you know, we're trying to do is like give you information from the digital marketing coalface stuff we're experiencing, you know, this client's gone through it, we've rescued it for them. We hope, uh, and, um, don't make that mistake. That's the whole point, the whole point of talking about it, isn't it really?
So do you think we need to talk about how we remedied it or not really a bit boring?
Well, we kind of have we have, you know. Yeah. I think going into the, you know, the nitty gritty of it, I don't think we necessarily need to. I think that would definitely put the two people that are still listening to sleep. Uh, so I don't think we need to do that. Um. Oh, well, I can't can't think of anything else to talk about just now. So let's let's wrap this up. We, uh, we have got, uh, a guest lined up, haven't we, Michael from New York who has that fantastic, uh, SEO tool.
Don't look at me to remember what it's called. I can see what you're doing in Visio. Something like that.
Yeah. So we've been chatting to Michael Visio. He's going to come on the podcast. We're going to go on his LinkedIn stream. Um, and so we said, hey, you know, if you want us to do that to talk about, um, one of our SEO tools that we developed, uh, seed keywords dot com. Um, we said, why not come on and talk about, talk about your stuff as well, which is good. So it's been a while since we've had a guest on, we've kind of knocked a few people back who wanted to come on, but didn't really feel like it was a good fit for, for our, for our.
Yeah, I mean, we were trying to keep it sort of useful and helpful and actionable, aren't we? What we don't really want is a load of people on here to promote stuff.
Yeah. That's right. Okay. But if you'd like to come on the podcast, talk about any aspect of digital marketing, maybe you're a digital marketing manager or maybe you're working in digital marketing, or maybe you're just interested in digital marketing, or you've got a good story to tell you. Maybe you want to talk about content marketing or storytelling or any, any of that stuff. Then, uh, read evolution dot com. Uh, you can email us info at, uh, or you can fill in one of the forms on pretty much every page of our website. Uh, this podcast lives at fromthecoalface.com. And, um, as most people know, is accessible from all the usual places like Spotify and, and, um, Deezer and God knows what else the youngins are using the youngins.
Yeah. I was gonna say it feels very modern to be going someone's, uh, live stream, doesn't it? Yeah.
That's right. Absolutely. I'm definitely gonna get my hair and makeup done. Yeah, I think you should as well.
All right.
Okay, that's all for now. And thanks for listening.
Thanks very much.