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Duct Tape SEO: How To Fix Optimization That Breaks

Posted by Michael Martinez on August 13, 2007 in Content Theory

Here in the United States we like to believe you can fix anything with duct tape. I have personally seen people do things with duct tape that NASA has yet to attempt with its most sophisticated rocket systems. Duct tape is like the handyman’s miracle drug. I think there is a law that says if you’re putting together a survival kit you have to include duct tape and a box of matches. I haven’t figured out what the matches are for.

If there is a downside to using duct tape, it’s probably that whatever solution you contrive is likely to be permanent. Even if you can get the duct tape off of whatever you wrap in it, you’ll leave behind a sticky mess that just rots in summer and makes your winter wish for spring. So don’t ever put duct tape on something you hope to really have repaired.

In search engine optimization things sometimes break down for no good reason at all and you’re faced with making some hard choices. There are a few things you can do that act like permanent solutions, and if you resort to them you’re probably better off just leaving them in place.

Truly robust SEO doesn’t just focus on search engine indexes. You have to look beyond the search results pages to what happens after people find your Web documents, because people inevitably find your documents in ways you never anticipated. That’s a problem and it’s a big problem when you have a lot of pages. You need to be prepared to solve it quickly. That’s when you bring in the duct tape-class SEO.

404 Error Redirection Page Optimization

For years I would just automatically redirect all 404 errors to either my HTML sitemap page or my root URL (primary index page). Many a Webmaster laughed and snickered at me for not simply throwing up an ErrorDocument page that says, “You’ve reached the wrong page. Please let whomever linked here know that the URL you clicked on no longer exists.”

I, of course, never found such pages to be useful. Instead, I’d rather help people find what they’re looking for with as little fuss as possible. Some people have suggested parsing out the referral data to see which page was being sought and then redirecting to a substitution URL. Hm. That might be worth your time on a low-traffic site but when you have to deal with all the broken links that point to Xenite.Org, you’ll see why mapping broken links to new content is an endless pain in the neck.

In any event, Yahoo! and Google decided to test my domain for “correct” Error 404 handling. Yahoo! does it by randomly testing non-existing URLs and filling up my error log files with useless entries. Google does it by insisting my domain return a proper code 404 for a non-existing URL (even though they don’t do anything with the non-existing URL). Google babbles about how this authenticates my claim to control the server or something totally useless and spineless.

Still, that’s two major search engines that want to see a code 404 returned for a non-existing URL. Fine. I created a custom 404 document and turned it into a mini HTML sitemap. It links to my most important sections (including both the root URL and the HTML sitemap) and invites people to poke around. The search engines see their 404 code and visitors coming from truly broken links still see actual content that helps them get to where they want to be.

As an added bonus, if I create a new page and link back to my own content, the custom 404 document helps my visitors find stuff if I accidentally break a link until the next time I check my error log file. Search engines do not index custom 404 pages or follow the links, so don’t even hope you can twist them to your advantage. Use custom 404 pages to optimize for the other side of the search process.

Rigged Search Referrals

Don’t know what else to call them. Basically, if you cannot link to your own page, linking to a query results page that favors your document over others is the next best thing to do.

Do me a favor and click on the first Grace Park page in these Ask search results, will you?

Some search engines will look at who clicks through on a page and take that into consideration in later searches. This is an old trick some people used to boost their click popularity with DirectHit (and not the most effective, I might add).

Did the rigged query ever work? I have no idea, but it does serve as a neat way to help people find content on your site. You can minimize cluttered search results by using Javascript to generate a link to a search engine that only searches sites you choose. You don’t have to embed search engines’ interfaces in your pages if you don’t want to (hence, you don’t have to co-brand your pages with those annoying WWW searches).

Now, you can hard-code a search tool in your content, or hard-code links with specific queries, but suppose you actually parse query data as people hit your page (use Javascript to check the QueryString environment variable). Suppose they hit the wrong page. You have the option of sending them on a search through an engine that actually indexes more of your content than wherever they came from.

If you want to show people what your most popular or most important pages are without having to hard-code them, then just insert a link to a site search on IxQuick (one of the better meta search engines, in my opinion). Clusty will give you an Ask-like folder-based interface that drills down into deep content so you can feed it query strings and still produce a lot of search results. Dogpile also offers site search but unlike IxQuick it doesn’t grade your pages with stars and unlike Clusty it doesn’t offer much deep content.

Context-sensitive navigation and footers

Anywhere from 12-18% of all surfers turn off their Javascript or simply do not have Javascript. You should always offer a hard-coded NOSCRIPT alternative to Javascript if you use it, but if you parse QueryString data you can make some guesses at what other content you have to offer that visitors to your page may be interested in. That is, you can program your margin and footer navigation to offer alternative content based on queries people use to find your page in search engine.

In other words, if people consistently hit the wrong page on your site from one particular search engine (or 2 or 3), you can give them customized margin/footer text to help them find the right page. This way you don’t redirect, you don’t hide anything, and you don’t break any search engine guidelines. But this method is not a substitute for good internal linkage — it’s just a fix for long tail queries that end up on the wrong page.

This tool may also help with over-optimized root URLs. Most people make the mistake of asking for links back to their root URLs. If you’re getting all sorts of search traffic to the home page, you can write context-sensitive margin and footer links and promote the content that people need to see without impacting your standard navigation.

eCommerce, Questions, and Answers

eCommerce sites offer the most opportunity for optimization and yet people struggle to make their pages distinctive, relevant, and informative to visitors. The most common technique I’ve seen used is to include tools that allow people to review products, discuss them, and rate them. Some variations on these types of pages include providing location information, vendor information, and other highly specific, very focused content.

What you seldom see on eCommerce sites but which lends itself very easily to on-page optimization is the simple Q and A format of providing information. For example, if you’re selling nails, there are many different types of nails. Each nail product page can include a series of questions, such as, “What type of nails should I use to attach upholstery to furniture?”

Follow the question with the answer: “Use Honest Mike’s upholstery nail number 4 because it was made to help upholsterers fasten upholstery to furniture with nails”.

Does that sound a bit contrived? You can agonize over how many ways you might ask the same question without looking like a dork or just list the questions. Maybe one answer will work best for a dozen questions. Be sure to use both the product name and the more commonly known product descriptive names.

You can include questions as bullet points. You can bold them or not. You can bold the answers or not, but you should ensure that people find the questions and answers just as easily as they find the product information.

And ask your own questions, such as “How do I buy an upholstery nail from SEO Theory?” Be sure you provide an intuitively obvious answer next to the question. Don’t embed this kind of content in nested table structures. You should be able to use one table element to contain all the information. Some people would insist you use Cascading Style Sheets to organize the data but regardless of whether you use tables, CSS and tables, or just CSS, do not separate the answers from the questions. Make sure the answers and questions are together when the page is linearized.

People often reach product pages and don’t know if they have found the right products. You may have used links to point people to your upholstery nail page (which is bad SEO but a lot of people do it and that is why we have duct tape SEO). If people find a page because of link anchor text, then most likely the page has too little helpful information on it. Don’t destroy your credibility by assuming that everyone who finds your product page immediately understands what to do with the product.

When SEO creates problems, SEO has to fix them

The takeaway from this should be simple: search engine optimization may create problems for you. The best solution for SEO-based problems is an extension of SEO — what I call duct tape SEO. Think of duct tape SEO as the positive force that cancels out the negative force. Duct tape SEO is the alkaline that neutralizes the acidic factors produced by weak search engine optimization.

Sites that rely too much on links — as well as sites that simply gather a lot of links — eventually run into problems as their content evolves beyond the capability of inbound links to help people find appropriate content. This is only one of many reasons why search engines that look at links aren’t doing anyone any favors. But that’s another post.

Sooner or later your inbound links kick you in the gut and rip your heart out by causing people who would have appreciated your content to leave your site before they find the right content. Duct tape SEO doesn’t look pretty but it gets the job done with a minimum of effort and fuss. Use duct tape SEO to help people decide to stay on your site a little bit longer.

Contrary to popular belief, good SEO really can and often does go bad, just like mountains really can and eventually do become flat plains. Time changes everything. If a search engine changes its algorithm you can always change your optimization strategy, but if you change your Web site then you need a fallback plan that doesn’t require you to undo everything you built up in the past with search engine optimization.

You need the freedom and flexibility of being able to change your Web content as your site matures and grows to address new needs and priorities. Duct tape SEO gives you that freedom and flexibility so that you don’t have to sacrifice useful search visibility. Duct tape SEO can extend the life of old search engine optimization well beyond its original useful life span.