Companies in the UK are going into administration on a daily basis here in the UK and very little attention is being paid to the websites during the administration process. In most cases the website is taken over by the administrators and the staff who have been working on the site are either made redundant or don’t have chance to explain how it should be handled.
Administrators are normally working to try and find a buyer for the troubled company so you would expect them to treat the website (which is often one of the companies biggest sources of income) with a little care and attention. As we’ve seen in recent weeks quite the opposite is true and in most cases the online presence couldn’t have been handled any worse.
Below is the definitive guide to what administrators should be doing when they take over the running of a companies website.
Turn off the shopping cart
Most administrators seem to think that all website traffic comes via the homepage and that they can put a message on there and everybody will stop using the shopping cart. This is totally incorrect – people arrive to product pages and buy products from there and in a lot of cases recently the shopping cart has still happily accepted orders even when the homepage says orders can’t be fulfilled.
If the company is no longer able to trade then turning off the shopping cart should be step 1.
Add an SEO friendly error message to the site
This step is very important to get right and is quite technical. The two key aspects are as follows:
- Inform customers of the situation
- Preserve search engine trust & rankings
Every page on the site needs to return a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable HTTP status code in the same way as you would if your site was undergoing temporary downtime. The example below tells Googlebot to retry after a week.
<?php
header("HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable");
header("Status: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable");
header("Retry-After: 604800");
php?>
Once you have served this code on every page of the site the pages can be altered to contain a message to customers. This message needs to be accurate and informative. The statement Woolworths website gives is not acceptable:
Our site is currently undergoing essential maintenance. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
Please check back later.
Inform affiliates
If the company has an affiliate program then an email needs to be sent out straight away informing them of the situation. Affiliates are likely spending money on PPC campaigns and will be very upset if they waste a lot of money without getting paid for the sales generated.
Turn off PPC campaigns
You would be amazed at how many companies keep PPC campaigns running after they go into administration. If orders can’t be fulfilled then why pay for traffic to the site?
Keep people updated
If the situation changes or new information becomes available then why not add it to the website and keep loyal customers informed? Maintaining customer loyalty is paramount if the company is to be sold to a new owner.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
I had the same thought – seen a few of those about lately.
I’m guessing there will be a lot of domainers on the look out for a bargain or too!
Great article (as usual).
When I worked for a larger web design agency, we (sadly) had to take a site down when they went into administration.
There was a legal looking document I rec’d as account manager stating that as they had ceased trading they had to take the whole site down and replace it with a simple notice informing anyone the details of the administrators. It implied that leaving a full site up was in breach of some condition or other about implied trading (think that was the phrase, sorry I don’t have a copy of the letter, but someone else may know what I’m reffering too).
Patrick, I spotted this one yesterday for Empire Direct.
Marks out of 10?
A further thing to note; consider the Media, the BBC News were definitely quoting from what they read on this page yesterday – “low stock levels and operating losses”.
They seem to have taken down their whole website quite effectively, everything I tried landed back on this front page.
Interestingly, they are still running Google Ads – (I wasn’t going to click the ad and add to their financial burden with another 10p charge, but then I thought everyone else who reads this might! So I can tell you the ad link fails and returns an error “The system cannot find the path specified”.
Good post Patrick, how does the latest company into administration, Empire Direct, fare with its message: http://www.empiredirect.co.uk
Looks like the message is on every page, which is a start, but what about the headers?
On another related subject, have you wondered what will happen to the domain names of these big failing brands? woolworths.co.uk must be worth something for the domain trust at least, will it be sold off?
Find me on Twitter
Woolworths.co.uk is up for renewal in September. Worth trying to catch if the domain drops.
More comments from Patrick AltoftGood post. Another phenomenon rising out of this is that customers who see a company with a website along the lines of the original – “Undergoing Maintenance” – are now beginning to assume that said company is in administration!
Caution required all round.
Once a company fails like this one has there isnt anything that can really make anyone feel any better about it. I have noticed that the adwords is still running which demonstrates that the administartors dont know much about the web. You would have thought they would want to stop spending especially as it is for no purpose. However it is a real shame that http://www.empiredirect.co.uk failed.
Leave a Comment (registration is optional)