The Oops That Proves SEO Basics Still Matter – InstantFollowerz

When I asked today’s HubSpotter to share an SEO tactic, he asked if he could share a cautionary tale instead.

And I accepted because of his story PROOF that the technical fundamentals of SEO are still important — even in the face of major changes in search.

It’s a scary story of how we lost, then recovered, 41% of our targeted organic traffic and conversions.

Presented for approval to you marketing masters, I bring you a story I call… Tag-stories. (Canon barrel? I’ll find a joke eventually.)

A terrible day of searching

Our story begins with a call to France and an associate whose technical skills are surpassed only by his wicked Gaelic accent.

(To get the most out of this post, I suggest reading its lyrics out loud in your best French.)

Sylvain Charbit, our Senior Technical SEO Strategist, has been in SEO/content marketing for 15 years, so it takes a lot to upset him – an 82% drop in daily organic traffic is just such a thing.

“We discovered the problem in the most common way possible,” laughs Sylvain. “Conversion and traffic were suddenly in freefall.”

As you can see from the chart above, the pants were soiled on or around July 25th. The drop was first noticed by our conversion optimization team, who immediately called SEO. (I like to think of it as a disaster movie, where ragtag scientists inexplicably have a direct connection to some high-ranking general.)

The time frame coincided closely with the start of the new CRO test.

The affected URLs perfectly matched the ones tested.

But there was no reason why this test—a minor content change—should to destroy completely and pages from search results.

With no obvious culprit, the SEO team began an audit of the technical fundamentals.

“Do we have that tag here? Yes. Has the title tag changed? No,” Sylvain types off a mental list. “But when I checked the canonical mark? Then I saw that they were duplicates and that they were giving different instructions to the crawler bots.”

If it’s been a hot minute since you took SEO 101, here’s what it means: Whenever you have multiple versions of the same page, you’re adding a canonical tag—a bit of HTML code that tells search engines which page is the “real” one.

The test required two versions of each page and each pair had a canonical tag that pointed to each other.

If that’s still confusing, imagine each page pointing to the other like a Spider-Man meme.

The result? Completely removing all test URLs from search results.

Sylvain explains, “When Google is in doubt, it will decide to just drop the URL entirely. To say, ‘Hey, that doesn’t make any sense at all. Just in case, I’m going to remove it because that doesn’t sound like the result I want to present to visitors.'”

In other words, even if your overall brand is as reliable as HubSpot, messing up the basics can make individual pages look unreliable.

“Something as seemingly trivial as a duplicate tag could have a truly devastating impact.”

Technical Takeaways

So how did a simple content test affect our basic HTML code?

The fake tags were created when we activated a third-party A/B testing tool, which will remain anonymous to protect the innocent.

Seriously, they’re innocent this time. Turns out we were using an old version of software integration.

After the problem was identified and the duplicate tags fixed, it took several days for the pages to return to their rightful place in the search results.

Until then, the average damage amounted to 41% of the loss in traffic and water.

But that quick recovery time isn’t something everyone can count on. Search engine bots often visit large sites like ours. This means that small brands are likely to recover more slowly.

This makes it all the more important to be careful with your technical fundamentals.

I asked Sylvain if that was the main lesson of this story. Is it “SEO basics still important?” Is it “Keep your software up to date?”

He offers this: “Let’s not wait until there’s a problem before we do regular checks.”

And this is manifested in three ways:

1. QA tests and pre-launch software integrations.

“Before I would say ‘keeping your software up to date’—yes, this is something you should definitely be doing—but not running a test first before reviewing everything is fine.”

Any time you plan to test your existing website, be sure to allow time for quality assurance.

If you can, bring your SEO and conversion teams together to make sure every interest is represented.

And while you’re at it…

2. Regularly check sample pages for SEO basics.

SEO, unfortunately, is not a set-it-and-forget-it game.

“Test or preview your website samples regularly,” recommends Sylain. “Like a few blog posts, a few pages of categories.”

But it doesn’t have to be an overly deep task. It can really be a quick overview of the basics.

“There’s a tendency to say you have to dive into fine-grained analysis, you have to check all the lines of code that are deep in the system, but sometimes the most common things are forgotten because, well, you know, SEOs get used to that.”

3. Consider an SEO audit tool.

“Or even easier,” he adds. “Have a tool like Content King that will check you and immediately flag if something is out of the ordinary.”

SEO audit tools they regularly audit your site for you, and many will track changes to underlying content or code.

“Because even if the testing software was up to date, you don’t know what conflicts might arise with any third-party tool or extension you use,” adds Sylvain.

But if that’s not in the budget, you’re out of luck. Below, I’ll walk through how HubSpot users can check their canonical tags in just a few seconds.

How to check canonical tags in HubSpot

By default, most pages and posts are automatically set as canonical in HubSpot. (Bloglist sites are an exception, but the reason for that could be the post itself. For now, just believe that’s a good thing.)

If you want to change it, or if you’re worried that something has already changed… well… ask your Sylvain before you go messing around.

If they say it’s OK, here’s what you’ll do:

1. Go to Content and then Websites, landing pages, hours Blog depending on the type of page you are checking.

2. Hover over an existing page, then click Edit.

3. In the editor, click Settings > Advanced.

4. If the canonical tag is set to anything other than the original page, you will see it displayed under “Customize the canonical URL.”

If that field is empty, chances are your canonical tag is set to the original page and you’re good to go.