When SEO Fails

Even the most conscientious web developer will eventually discover a website environment that does not respond to traditional seo efforts.

When seo fails, when legitimate efforts and good intentions are not good enough, where do you turn? Whether the site is lacking robustness, or is penalized, a site that is not performing is only a stress inducing liability.

At the enterprise level, when seo fails, you have a black hole sucking resources and time, and very possibly putting the enterprise itself at risk. When the productive. natural search ranks are stripped away from a business that is reliant on them, nothing is more important than a solution.

A large implementation spanning many countries and languages has search compliance considerations that no small site will ever encounter. Automation is a requirement to address the numerous issues. For example, keeping track and control of content redundancies with either disallows or nofollows across a huge number of domains and pages would be impossible without automation.

But sometimes the automation is the problem. When seo fails via automation, it fails big. Sometimes REALLY BIG.

Unseen consequences, lack of full consideration when first implementing, automation not taking into account compliance considerations, all are the explanations for this disaster. But what you'll be looking at is lost ranks and a lot of questions. The complexities of an issue triggered by existing (and previously working) automation are impossible to diagnose without enterprise level optimization expertise.

Are you prepared for the inevitable - when seo fails? Sounds so provocative to ask, but lower level penalties, or rank weaknesses caused by minor compliance issues, plague many, many sites. Whether it's human error, weak cms, no accountability, etc. these issues can ramp up any problems exponentially via your automation. And it might be already happening, going unnoticed. Except for those ranking difficulties.

When building relevant, targeted content or posting links with target anchors no longer impacts ranks, it's going to feel like your seo is failing. And it is. But the issue may be a compliance failure. At the enterprise level, this kind of failure often involves an automation miscue on a simple but critical attribute. Many search marketers believe they can seo themselves out of any bad rank. But if the posting protocols are not held to appropriate standards, there's a high probability that the system will eventually become non-compliant. And trying to seo a non-compliant website will not only fail, it may trigger the failure, and that failure may be a penalized site.

Sometimes, when seo fails, the real issue is search compliance.