As always I won’t mention names as I do not want to upset anyway.
Anyway when I first got my own SEO company it was more me just taking over an existing company as no-one else could do the job. It was actually a more web design orientated company that also did SEO. Unfortunately the other web designers f**ked off to set up a new company. At the time I thought I was quite lucky I had avoided the situations of starting out completely fresh and I had a residual income from the remaining clients. However what I did not realise was all the f**cking mistakes I had to fix because the old people were incompetent. Looking back in hindsight it probably would of been better to start a fresh company.
Anyway one of the mistakes I had to fix was done by using a 301 redirect. Now I know ever SEO in the world knows about them but at the time I had never actually implemented 301s for more than a couple of pages here and there.
The problem I faced was the old designers had won a web design contract for a company which I will use Yossarian Designs for an example. Now Yossarian Designs already had a domain called YossarianDesigns.co.uk which worked with exchange etc and all the branding was for that domain. Somewhere along the line either the old designers or the IT people at Yossarian Designs decided they could not host the site on YossarianDesigns.co.uk because it would require transfering the domain and them breaking the exchange email.
Instead they put the site on Yossarian-Designs.co.uk and YossarianDesigns.co.uk mirrored the hyphen version. Now this unfortunately led to both domains being in Google’s index with exactly the same content so when the site started to become a little more popular it was smacked down with a penalty for dupe content.
After an hour or so of panicking I contacted the company explaining the situation. I told them they either had to host the site on YossarianDesigns.co.uk ont heir own servers or they could change the A Record to my servers. Surprisingly they changed the A Record with no problem. I say surprisingly because at the time I assumed it would be an idiot IT department that cause all this problem by no having a clue what an A Record was. It turns out it must of been the old designers who had no clue about it!
The other little problem I had was the site was developed in ASP and therefore on a shared IIS server, and some of the pages were in HTML. So I couldn’t actually 301 each individual page as I had a problem with the HTML pages so I had to change the whole sever over to Apache and then use the htaccess to 301 the pages for me using the following code:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.YossarianDesigns.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]
I am not really a htaccess geek so I was quite happy when it all started to work. I was even happier when a week later the original rankings (before the penalty) were transferred over to the YossarianDesigns.co.uk so overall I was quite happy with the result. It was just a shame that it had to happen in the first place.
