Managers do well to consider worst case scenarios and SEO consultants dread the consequences. Of all the damaging things that can happen, here are 10 of the worst things that can happen to your website, all of which are coming from a search point of view.  Some of these scenarios are completely self-inflicted and therefore totally avoidable. The other scenarios leave your website mostly at the mercy of outsiders.

#1 Exclude The Search Engines!

The humble robots.txt file is such a simple little file and it is so often ignored. Its an effective and easy to implement file that can be used to stop bad bots from crawling a site. It is also used for disallowing the good ‘bots’ from spidering folders and files that you don’t want to have in the SERP’s, such as sensitive documents or the cgi-bin.  However, be careful not to exclude to Googlebot, Yahoo! Slurp or Live’s MSNbot.  How easy would this be? The following two lines of code is all it takes to tell Google, “Thanks for visiting but do not come into this website or include any pages into your index“:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

#2 Exclude The Search Engines (Take Two)

Similar to the first point, by adding a “Meta NoIndex” to the header of a webpage will signal the search engines to not index that page.  If a page is not indexed, it cannot rank for any keywords.  If it does not rank in the search engines then it won’t receive any search traffic. This has happened to a number websites where a “Meta NoIndex” has mistakenly been applied to important pages and its one mistake to avoid, especially when websites are coming out of the development stage.

#3 Website Spidered During Redesign

Most web designers implement redesigns by working on a staging server first before launching the new website in the launch phase. Other web designers have been known to implement major ‘dev’ changes live on site.  Needless to say, it could be slightly embarassing and somewhat of a SEO setback to either have a half-finished website spidered during a redesign or have the entire staging server spidered and included into the search engine ranking pages.

#4 Website Suffers Hacker Attack

There are several reasons why hackers attack websites, the first of which is pure vandalism by leaving a malicious message on the site. The second reason has to do with money, in the case of ecommerce websites hackers will want to get access to your website in order to steal your revenue.  A third reason is to install some form of badware on your site, software that when downloaded by the visitor, will fundamentally disregard their choice regarding their computer will be used. The fourth reason is to drain your website’s search engine equity by planting links to dodgy sites on your website.

Furthermore, if a website is comprised by hackers and it goes unoticed, the search engines could crawl the website while in the interim period and place a “This site may harm your computer” warning message in the SERPs.  If this occurs rankings and traffic will plunge dramatically and it can take weeks for the traffic to recover after the problem has been fixed and a reinclusion request is made.

#5 Hosting Outages

Asides from visitors not being able to access your website when its down (and all the associated losses in traffic and revenue), have you considered the implications for your SEO and SEM campaigns? From the SEO point of view, search engines won’t be able to spider your latest content and may even penalise websites if their bots try to visit when it’s experiencing server problems.  In terms of SEM, any paid search campaign will be referring traffic to a landing page that is down. This is obviously a waste in paid search budget as well as it negatively effecting the CPC and quality score.

#6 Target Vanity Keywords

Sometimes in our quest for more traffic we go after keywords that we think will bring in hoardes of visitors to a website when in actual fact, nobody really searches for those keywords. Similarily, sometimes websites neglect to pursue keywords that are known to convert better. Hence, there is an importance of solid keyword research to not only find out what people are searching for but what words they use in that search. Not only is this true in organic search, but also paid search campaigns where budgets get depleted by paying for keywords which have no relevance to the target website.

#7 Domain Squatting

Think of domain names as Internet real estate. Would you allow people or companies to own your main marketing slogans or brand terms? And for the price of a decent bottle of wine you can put your brand name (CCTLD) beyond the reach of domain squatters.

#8 Duplicate Content

Sometimes website content can get duplicated on a website unintentionally. Duplicate content is defined as multiple webpages that largely have identical content.  For example, an ecommerce store might offer visitors printer-only versions of product pages across a whole catalogue of products. In so doing, a website with 5,000 products could easily become a 10,000 page website with 1000’s of identicals. For SEO, this means that the overall ability of the website to rank well for keywords and phrases is greatly impeded. To use an illustration, by bloating a website with duplicate content its like driving a tank instead of a high performance car!

#9 Website Cloaking

Showing users one website/page meanwhile presenting the search engines completely different content is defined as ‘cloaking’. The term is probably derived from the Klingons in Star Trek and historically has been a ‘black hat’ tactic used to effectively deceive the search engines into ranking a website much better than it otherwise would.  Less sophicated versions of cloaking involve using white text hidden against a white background or positioning content off screen where it cannot be seen by a visitor. Interestingly, more than a few brands have had their fingers burned by trying to ‘game’ Google using this tactic.

#10 Ignore SEO Basics

Forget about cloaking and hacking, by far the most common thing that impairs a website from ranking well is simply to ignore SEO best practice. By ignoring the implementation of metadata, website archecture, properly coded HTML and link building a website will struggle to achieve the visibility and search engine rankings it would otherwise reach.