Better Safe than Sorry
Our website is a really popular site in our neck of the woods; we have a stable foundation of online business and were searching for ways to increase our organic search engine traffic.
It is one thing to presume that you know what you are doing when it comes to Search Engine Optimization and it’s another thing to actual know in reality. As a hobby, I read a lot of resources online about and hear people talk about the importance of title title tags and meta tags, how to create internal links in a website properly, implement SEO friendly changes and what not.
So, I reckoned, I could easily implement a few tactics by myself and started trying out stuff with our businesses web site. My first thought was what does a web developer know? that I don’t know, right. This is where things took a turn for the worst.
The distinction between theory and application is extensive; we figured we would apply some of the
things we read about on implementing 301 redirects using the .htaccess file.
Just so you know,if anyone reading this get an inclination to to implement changes on their own, heed the warning of someone who made that same assumption, just don’t.
Turns out in our attempts to perform the mod rewrite, we fumbled the syntax and as a result most valuable pages redirect loop from the non canonical version of our site and ended up dropping some of our pages in Google.
Supposedly this occurs when more than one variant of a page as a result of duplicate content issues and the search engine eliminates deletes the other variation.
In either case, we messed up the redirect real bad an it ended up costing us time, energy and traffic from our excursion into unchartered territory.
Luckily, we were able to find a reputable SEO company who helped fix the problem and showed us the proper way to carry out additional changes, in the event that we wanted to muck around again.
Another thing we discovered was the grandness of protocol, making backups, not changing too many variables and once and how to chart progress with a process map to keep your code in order.
If, or when your website fails, you need to know how to recover it to how it was or implement some type of temporal fix until you can determine a long-term solution.
the takeaway here is, what you read online can be educational and fascinating, but, there is a reason why people are specialists.
So, before you simply dismiss something like SEO and roll up your sleeves with the DIY attitude, be aware for every action, there is an equal of greater reaction.
In this scenario, it was our site splitting itself up so, be cautious with the .htaccess file and its best left to professionals , so you can focus on your own business instead.
