Keeping your Google juice

Some time ago, a collection of newspapers decided they deserved better rankings in Google. Not because they had mastered SEO, built better websites, or done anything particularly clever. No, they simply felt Google should give them a better seat at the table.

Nice try. Insert coin.

Then came the New York Times, providing a rather spectacular demonstration of what happens when a large, respectable organization meets the mundane realities of the web. The goal was straightforward enough: merge the International Herald Tribune website into the New York Times. Two venerable newspaper brands becoming one big happy digital family. What could possibly go wrong?

Quite a lot, apparently. Before the move, Google returned roughly 993 000 hits for IHT. Afterwards? One. Not one million. Not one thousand. One.

That is the SEO equivalent of moving house and, rather than forwarding your mail, setting fire to the old building and leaving a handwritten note somewhere in Manhattan saying, “We’ve moved”.

The problem was beautifully simple. Instead of redirecting each old IHT article to its corresponding new address at the New York Times, they redirected everything to the NYT front page. To Google, hundreds of thousands of distinct destinations suddenly became one. Years of accumulated Google juice went down the drain.

Eventually, Google will crawl and index the articles at their new locations. Search engines are patient creatures. But much of the authority and Google juice attached to the old addresses had already been sacrificed to the gods of poorly planned migration.

And the painful part is that this was entirely avoidable. Proper permanent redirects (good old 301s) could have told Google, “This article used to live here. Now it lives over there. Please bring the reputation with you”.

Reading an almost innocent newspaper in San Francisco.

This isn’t specifically about beating up the New York Times. Plenty of organizations have made the same mistake, usually after spending considerable amounts of money on consultants, migration plans, PowerPoint slides and meetings involving the phrase “digital transformation”.

The lesson is broader. When you publish something on the web, the URL is part of the content. People link to it. Search engines remember it. Reputation accumulates around it. Treating URLs as disposable plumbing is a fine way to discover just how much traffic that plumbing was carrying.

For many websites, search engines are still responsible for a substantial part of the audience. SEO therefore isn’t some mysterious dark art practiced by people whispering keywords into dead chickens. Mostly, it’s common sense. And when you move almost a million pages, remembering where you put them.