International Herald Tribune removes all pages from Google
Via Gawker comes a story that will make anybody in the SEO industry cringe. The International Herald Tribune (owned by the New York Times) has decided to change from iht.com to http://global.nytimes.com/.
As if that wasn’t a bad enough move they are redirecting all 988,000 of the pages on the iht.com site to http://nytimes.com/marketing/iht/. That means they lose all the long tail traffic they get from search engines not to mention people clicking on the hundreds of thousands of links they probably have.
The New York Times has been demanding Google welfare, which would artificially promote the newspaper’s stories in search results. Yet inept Times webmasters just killed hundreds of thousands of their own Google hits.
The newspaper probably wouldn’t need to go begging for special favors from the search engine if it simply ran its Web operations with basic technical competence. Instead, the Times murdered the website of the International Herald Tribune tonight.
Post category: Search Engine Optimisation Tweet
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 8 comments below, or add your own!
Not Google’s fault at all – Another incompetent web manager not showing due diligence.
Did someone say P45? Perhaps we should all email them and advise how bad a decision this is.
Like we say in South Africa when someone does something incredibly stupid: EISH!!
Migration Strategy Fail!
I wonder if some poor SEM advisor is going to get into trouble over this when he was probably not even consulted about the move because it’s an “IT not marketing concern”.
@Craig Parker I’ve had run ins with IT Managers who thought along similar lines. One even going so far as to advise that the client in question could just take a break from SEO and everything would be fine. What a tool.
Unfortunately this sort of this thing is rife. As an SEO asked to provide migration advice numerous times, I’ve seen system administrators just completely ignore explicit instructions to 301 redirect URLs to their new location. Then you just sit and watch the traffic in their analytics drop dramatically as all that juicy long tail traffic stops until they get re-indexed. I don’t know if they’re just too busy with the site move or look at the size of the task and can’t be bothered. A real shame though.
I have seen this mistake too many times, but I am really surprised this happened in IHT
2 trackbacks
March 30, 2009 at 4:01pm
May 11, 2009 at 11:46pm