Articles: Marketing & Sales

If it Ain't Broke, Don't Fix it

Dave LaLonde is Senior Vice President and Search Engine Optimizer for Auto Credit Express. The ACE Group is a special finance total solutions firm offering their dealership partners entry level and advanced sub prime training, an easy to use online software, and an expert auto sales lead system.

In an attempt to create a better user experience and increase conversions last month, we released a new design of one of our websites. The original website has been generating free traffic via the search engine for years and placed well on Google for hundreds of competitive keyword searches. After the new version was released we noticed an increase in conversions so we concluded that the new recipe had, in fact, created a better user experience.

A few weeks later the site was removed from Google's top search results and the website traffic dwindled to a handful of visitors per day. Aside from the look of the site, I thought not much of the ingredients had changed. A few web pages were added, a few removed, and a few renamed.

To view Google's opinion of the new web design recipe, I logged into my Google account and visited the Webmaster Tools section. From there I was able to see what their spider, known as googlebot, thought of the new site design. I was shocked at what I saw!

Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on Dec 30, 2006.
Web crawl errors
HTTP errors	2
Not found	355
URLs	0
URLs restricted by robots.txt	3
URLs timed out	2
Unreachable URLs	8
Total:	370

According to googlebot the new design contained 370 errors. The previous version contained none. I then understood why the site was removed from the top search results. They viewed the website as poor quality and assumed that it would create a bad user experience even though these were errors humans would never find.

There are three ingredients we include in any new website before it is released to the World Wide Web. This time, however, we left these ingredients out of the website's redesign. The first item is very easy but often over looked by webmasters.


This error often results from leaving pages on the web server that have been removed from the site. As was the case with our site; there were eight orphaned pages that were still on the web server from the old site design that were no longer reachable via the new site. Often these unreachable pages will create another problem, broken links.


Once again this was the case with our site. The eight pages that were no longer reachable via the new site had links to hundreds of pages that no longer existed. Over time, this error may correct itself; chances are that Google would remove the eight pages from its index at some point.


HTML is a language. Within any language there may be different dialects and slang terms. There are only a few HTML dialects that are understood by all web browsers and search engine spiders. Web pages that are designed properly begin by letting the web browser and search spider know which dialect they are using. Our new site was using a different dialect but we did not inform googlebot to assign a different interpreter.

Is Your Website Broken?
The steps to check for two of the three ingredients are quite simple and most can be performed by anyone, without even having access to the server where your website resides. The steps to correct the errors are quite technical so I will not address them now.

Validate your Websites HTML
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) maintains the standards for each recognized dialect of HTML. According to W3C standards, each HTML document requires a document type declaration. The "DOCTYPE" is the first line of code in the HTML document and tells which version of HTML, or dialect, your webpage is using.

To generate a report of the errors within your home page's HTML visit http://validator.w3.org/checklink. Type in your full website address and click the Validate this page button.

Check Your Website for Broken Links.
Your webmaster should have a tool to check for broken links within your website. There are, however, many free tools available on the web that will generate a broken links report. For example if you visit dead-links.com you can type in your sites URL, click launch, and wait for the report. For other tools go to Google and search for Broken Links Checker.

Check Your Website for Orphaned Pages
To check your site for orphaned pages you will need access to the server. If you are the webmaster chances are your web development software has a built in tool to check the web server for orphaned pages. If not you can use Google's Webmaster Tools by following these simple steps.

• If you do not already have an account with Google you'll have to create one by visiting google.com/accounts/NewAccount.
• Once your account is created visit google.com/webmasters/ and login.
• Navigate to the My Account, then Webmaster Tools Section.
• Add your website to your account.
• To view Google's statistics on your website you will have to validate that you are the site owner or administrator. They list two methods; both require access to the web server.
• After you have validated the site you will have access to numerous reports including a list of orphaned web pages.

You may not be your store's webmaster. In fact, chances are, that task is outsourced to a web design company. If your site, however, is not showing up in the top results for the keywords you are targeting, the first two checks above may give you an indication of why. If you discover errors point them out to the web designers, they should be able to correct them quickly. On the other hand, if your site is in the top spot for your targeted keywords leave it alone, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Published in World of Special Finance Magazine
February Issue 2007