Forum Moderators: martinibuster
WebmasterWorld is full of excellent advice on what to do; My question is:
What should we definitely not do?
What should we definitely not do?
Fail to test. By test I mean go to the actual page and make sure the changes you made are what you had in mind.
What should we definitely not do?
Let greed get in the way of common sense.
Corollary: Change the most profitable page(s) without testing the change on lower earning pages first.
That was my biggest mistake.
worst thing I've done: submitted my site to yahoo directory listings. they manually review the sites and mine was pulled off yahoo completely for one reciprocal links page. i realized what happened too late (4-5 months after) and after writing yahoo asking for forgiveness and removing the links page, the site is very slowly coming back in SERPS, this probably another 4 months after contacting them.
Lesson learned, check the weather before trying something that MUST be seamless.
Effects:- None other than a couple of concerned emails from regular visitors.
Freq---
I finished 2003 the web site for a new client. It was a sex related site.
Normal, I index all my sites with all my clients in my local search engine. But I thought this is really not good with the sex related site.
So I added some lines of code to the index routine
if ( index ( $domain, "sex" ) >= 0 ) { next }
But I had overseen the rest of the construct.
So it happened the exact opposit from what was intended.
As I tested, I noticed the error.
I tried immedeately to delete all the index files from the search index.
In this moment, the internet connection crashed.
5 desperate hours later, I had again an internet connection.
For luck, the delete command was performed before the connection crashed.
Only one person tried to search in the search box of one of my real estate clients something, what brought him very unexpected results.
accidentally deleted all .dbx files in my outlook folder and emptied the trashcan. the data volume was too high to recover them - only regained about 1% readable mails.
work for more than a week lost. as well a way to finish the job ;)
estimated loss for the following months: about 500$ (less content = less visitors = less income).
lesson learned: leave downloaded e-mails on server for two weeks before deletion.
I uploaded the incorrect style sheet and index .inc to the wrong site and checked the one I had supposedly updated and there was no difference!
Checked all the usual stuff and still no difference until I realised where it had been uploaded to.
Checked the "refreshed" site and it actually worked perfectly since it had been constructed from the same template however it had no relevancy whatsoever.
Result? Me having to buy the embarrassment beers!
Tons of clicks.
Nobody bought the book.
I hope some of them read the reviews and educated themselves on the plight of North African immigrants in France.
I hope the punk band advertising on the same keyword did better.
This was my second ad campaign ever. The cookbook that was my first advertising campaign ever has been my best one.
Fortunately most things are still working (including google ads), although a few pages are showing errors and emailing me hundreds of times to tell me so.
Probably only an hours downtime in the last 24 hours, but a stack of things for me to fix when I get home tonight. I *think* I know what I need to do, but would like to be fixing that at home, rather than sitting here at my real job...
Apparently google considers it a new page when the title tag (plus some minor adjustments) are changed a lot...
H
I have two golden rules now, both learnt from my mistakes!
>I've never done it. but i would NEVER change or test a high-paying page.
That is very smart advice, I have done it, but, would never do it again! Once you have a winning site leave it alone. If it looks old and outdated, but, makes money......leave it alone! Vanity is expensive!
I tried to remodel a very high paying oldish site (5+ years). It looked great afterwards, but ended up costing me a fortune in revenue as search engines didn't like it!....I had to change it back after a few months!
Now I only remodel a site if the "search Gods" fall out of favor with it first.
The other "worst thing" to do to a site is to change hosts for cost reasons. Once you find a great host stick with them. Never be tempted to switch to a lower cost provider because they "look" as good but are cheaper.
I have a lot of domains, and decided to switch from an excellent host who charges an arm and a leg for bandwidth to one who offers a lot of cheap bandwidth (data transfer volume). The cheaper host has been nothing but trouble, so now I'm moving all the sites back to the expensive host again. It has cost me 100+ times the potential savings in downtime, problems with hosting support, and just time messing with it.
"If it isn't broke, don't fix it", definitely applies as a golden rule also!
ok I have a very popular phone site that offers free downloads of wallpaper etc, anyway its been online for about 5 years and over time has been hit badly by people stealing bandwidth, they just put a link to my wallpaper, ringtones etc on there site, people download them but never visit my site.
tried loads of things to counter this including hotlink protection on all the files in question jpg, gif, mid, mp3 etc but all that did was stop them from displaying the wallpaper etc on there site.
the problem is that all my downloads are run through a download script, downlod.php so even though the images were not displayed on the other sites they could still click and download, I had the brilliant idea of now adding .php to the hotlink list and if someone clicked the link on another site it would send them to my home page great idea NOT
for a few days I noticed BIG drops in bandwidth and thought it was working but noticed that my adsence income took a BIG nose dive in the process, can anyone here guess why?
I get around 4,000 visitors a day from google and the other search engines and a few hundred from links on other sites, but becuase all my pages are php and I added php to the hotlink protection list all hell broke loose, if anyone clicked on a link to my site from any search engine or any other link the server gave them a "not allowed" page, the only people that could get to my site were those that typed in the url or had it stored in there favorites.
I lost thousands of visitors a day for the few days (about 5 days to be honest) and lost a few hundred dollars in the process, I mean when I think of it now I cant believe how stupid I was, I mean I banned google, yahoo, msn and every other link to my site for nearly a week.
there you go beat that
there you go beat that
I had started off hosting my site with a company whose name contains an eye and a power.
This site grew over many years of hard work to become THE authority site in its topic and coverage, I am talking major authority and tons of visitors, content and unsolicited incoming links..
In the process of growing I was delaying the move to a dedicated server as much as possible (stupid) until suddenly the site went offline, and stayed offline for over 2 weeks, turns out that terrible hosting company pulled the plug and blocked me out due to excess resources usage, which I found out after 11 days of calling and emailing into vacuum.
lost income, lost links, lost loyal visitors, sleep and a lot of hair too!
now hand me that cwown and stop all posts.
I found out after 11 days
Reminds me of the classic "Crash! The Web Hosting Company from Hell" article by Jim Daniels:
[sitepoint.com ]
Sounds great, but spent a fair amount of time on the book and it didn't sell one copy! The publisher decided to commission the book without doing any real research as to what market there was for it. I think he was looking at high paying keywords in the main. I did think there would be more of a market than 0 books though!
The other problem was that the ad for the book seemed to be affecting adsense earnings, so it ultimately had to go. I simply chalked the episode down to experience!
Reverted to the old advertising model after about 4 1/2 months, and it took several months to get back to old levels (of traffic).
Yeah, that was my dumbest mistake ever!
