The Oops That Proves SEO Basics Still Matter
By cdelprincipe@hubspot.com (Curt del Principe)
When I asked today’s HubSpotter to share an SEO tactic, he asked if he could share a cautionary tale instead.
And I accepted because his story proves that technical SEO basics still matter — even in the face of major search changes.
It’s the scary story of how we lost, and then recovered, 41% of targeted organic traffic and conversions.
Presented for the approval of you masters in marketing, I bring you a story I call … The Tell-Tale Tag. (The Cask of the Canonical? I’ll find the joke eventually.)
A Scary Day in Search
Our story begins with a call over to France, and a coworker whose technical skills are outmatched only by his wicked Gallic accent.
(To get the most out of this post, I suggest you read his lines aloud in your very best French.)
Sylvain Charbit, our senior technical SEO strategist, has been in SEO/content marketing for 15 years, so it takes a lot to rattle him — an 82% drop in daily organic traffic is just such a thing.
“We discovered the problem in the most common way possible,” Sylvain laughs. “Conversion and traffic were in freefall all of a sudden.”
As you can see from the graph above, pants were soiled on or around July 25th. The drop was first noted by our conversion optimization team, who immediately called over to SEO. (I like to imagine it like a disaster movie, where the ragtag scientists inexplicably have a direct line to some high-ranking general.)
The timeline matched closely with the start of a new CRO test.
The affected URLS matched perfectly to those being tested.
But there was no reason why this test—a minor content change—should completely annihilate those pages from the search results.
With no obvious culprit, the SEO team began an audit of the technical basics.
“Do we have that tag here? Yes. Did the title tag change? No,” Sylvain ticks off a mental list. “But when I checked the canonical tag? That’s when I saw that they were duplicates, and they were giving crawl bots different instructions.”
If it’s been a hot minute since you took SEO 101, here’s what that means: whenever you have multiple versions of the same page you add a canonical tag—a bit of HTML code that tells search engines which page is the “real” one.
The test required two versions of each page and each pair had a canonical tag that referenced each other.
If that’s still confusing, imagine each page pointed to the other like the Spider-Man meme.
The result? Complete removal of all test URLs from the search results.
Sylvain explains: “When Google has a doubt, it will decide to just drop the URL altogether. Saying, ‘Hey, that doesn’t make sense at all. Just in case, I will remove it because that doesn’t sound like a result I want to present to visitors.’”
In …read more
Source:: HubSpot Blog
