clickthinker - 8:46 pm on Nov 15, 2002 (gmt 0)

We built a site for a client and instead of charging for the design, build and optimisation of the site, we went the revenue sharing route - we get 8% on any bookings made from that site.
It’s a travel site, selling tours of Southern Africa and many of our fee based clients do exactly this and we were confident that we could crack it…

I made several mistakes with the optimisation that really cost us.
I’d like to think that we’ve fixed all of the mistakes and I want to lay them out here and maybe get some thoughts on how you guys deal with clients and identifying mistakes you make in a case like this.

As the company operated in several countries, we had a section on each country. Many of the tours sold went through several countries so we had those itineraries being duplicated in each of the countries.
For example tour 1 went through Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe.

In each of those country folders we had:
www.domain.com/namibia/tour1
www.domain.com/botswana/tour1
www.domain.com/zimbabwe/tour1

This created a lot of duplicate pages.
The problem was – from the begging we thought this made run foul in the engines. But failed to act on it thinking that there were enough pages not duplicated and we’d be OK.

We did in fact even get a top ten listing on Altavista for a while and then got dumped – At the time we weren’t to concerned with not being listed in AV, cause we were waiting for the big guy, Google to pick the site up. – Another mistake – I did not document the exact day I noticed we were no longer in AV and go back to the log files and ANALYSE!
Added to this, we got a good listing in the Yahoo! directory after doing a bait and switch and we were getting a fair amount of traffic from Yahoo! for our main keyword phrase. Now that Yahoo! is no longer displaying it directory straight up – traffics dried up from there.

In order to get traffic we tried buying a few terms on overture and this has been quite successful, we’ve gone on a huge reciprocal links campaign and that too is producing traffic.

As for the client, he has also been pretty cool about it all. I’ve played open cards with him from the beginning and while I know he is frustrated, I’ve been doing a good job of keeping him patient.
It has been made easier to keep him happy, as he has never paid a fee for the site and optimisation

So what I’ve learnt from this is:
- duplicate content is absolute poison and if there is ANY doubt in you mind, get rid of any duplicate content.
- If things go bad – obtaining reciprocal links, while it is slog work and frustrating, is a good way to substitute/compliment search engine traffic
- Even on a limited budget, you can get good traffic from PPC engines
- Document everything! AS soon as you think something is going down, MAKE time to analyse your notes
- Google is all powerful…
- The wheels of the web turn slowly
- Be honest with clients
- Spend more time in these forums!