Considering Massive Rewrites? Don’t Bother!

Late last month I received a bid request from a company who wanted to increase the amount of content on their website. In their email to me they mentioned that their site was founded in 2000, had about 300 pages indexed by Google, and they believed that there were about 5000 inbound links.

I did  a little research myself and discovered that while the home page had a PageRank of 4, most of the main inner pages were PR3 or PR2, with deeper pages showing up as PR1, PR0, if that. Though PageRank isn’t critically important, I was a bit surprised to find that this site wasn’t ranked as well as it could have been. Checking some of their competitor’s sites I found much better results which had me wondering — what were they doing wrong?

Digging deeper I discovered some problems with the site, mistakes made by a webmaster which needed to be corrected:

• For quite a few internal pages, there wasn’t much linking between other pages on the site. I didn’t find that many outbound links either, but there should have been more links between existing pages on the same URL.

• Some of the internal pages were difficult to find. Likely, when the site was first started, these pages were linked to some other page on the site, but were no longer. Effectively orphaned, these lone internal pages were getting absolutely no benefit from other pages, hence the grayed out Google toolbar ranking.

When I mentioned these matters to the owner, he was surprised. Clearly, when the site was launched in Spring 2000, all of the pages were properly linked. A web designer and writer were hired to put the site together and everything worked fine. However, I did learn that the company — in a bid to save some money — made some changes to the site themselves early in 2003 and again in 2005 whereby content was updated, new pages added, and the design tweaked.

I also learned that the owner was the one who did all of the changes. Ugh.

Anyway, the client had contacted me initially with the purpose to have me rewrite a bunch of pages to bring them up to date. His thinking was that the fresh content would be recognized by the search engines and encourage the “bots” to visit his pages. Though this is true, I mentioned that he could save a whole lot of time (and money) if he added the links in himself and update the content as needed. Each page FTP’d to the internet would invite a crawl from Googlebot provided his site map was up to date.

Naturally, I found out that he didn’t even have a site map in place so I instructed him on how to get one.  I also shared Google’s Webmaster Guidelines link and encourage the client to visit Google Webmaster Tools to add and verify his site and do the same with Yahoo! Site Explorer.

As for me, I’ll be doing some other work for this client, but nothing involving fixing internal problems made by others.  Most times I’d rather have people clean up their own mess and take on fresh work without hassling with old stuff.  Besides, learning from one’s mistakes has its advantages, particularly when you manage your own business.