When to Leave “Bad SEO” in Place

Sometimes we come across a site that gets great rankings in spite of itself. It might have a terrible title tag, poor content, a lousy navigational structure, or abysmally formatted URLs. Nonetheless, the site is holding top spots on Google and other engines for some very competitive terms, and holds its own against sites that obviously put a lot of time into building a solid SEO profile.

What do you change on a site that breaks the rules and still succeeds? Obviously, you can change what isn’t working. SEO consulting projects for high ranking sites with issues should be done a lot more cautiously, especially when the owner is making a viable income off the current site traffic. You might choose to bypass the homepage and work on interior pages first, in order to boost rankings on the pages that aren’t getting anywhere. If interior pages are copying the homepage title, then they probably aren’t ranking as well as they could be. You can leave the awful homepage title in place for now and fix what you know is broken.

Can you go wrong by adding content to lean pages? Sometimes. Your added content may be cannibalizing keywords from another page that previously had solid rankings. Running a ranking report that shows which URL-keyword matches can help you focus your topics and keyword choices in a way that prevents a drop in site rankings.

Similarly, URL structures are sometimes better left alone, assuming that they’re getting indexed. Instituting a server-level rewrite is usually recommended for most sites with multiple products and alphanumerical pages, but it can create a seismic shift in search engine rankings. This shift is not always positive.

What about links? Sometimes we see sites that are engaging in link acquisition schemes that can cause big penalties in Google. For instance, we see sites with thousands of identical anchor texts on hundreds of low value sites, or with sitewide text links. We still recommend removing those links ASAP, since a competitor doing a backlink check might recognize paid links and report them to Google. Naturally, some alternative “search engine friendly” link building should be in place while these links are being removed. One advantage of reducing multiple bad links is that you can eventually recognize the valuable ones that have been powering the site. You may even want to try and rework these inbound links so anchors go from saying “click here” to something a little more topical.


Usually a trip through Google Webmaster Tools will help you identify all the issues that can be worked on in the meantime. If pages aren’t getting indexed, or the site has a lot of dead links, then fixing these issues will help the site maintain rankings, and perhaps rise. Duplicate titles and descriptions should be addressed as quickly as possible. As a general rule, if Google is pointing something out, you should endeavor to fix it, and repairing duplicate descriptions can be as simple as adding a few words in front of a canned description on each page. Duplicate titles are a bigger problem, especially if they match the homepage title, and even a quick edit on these could improve results for all pages.

This is not to say that a site shouldn’t be fixed eventually. High ranking sites with bad SEO require a lot of thought and a clear strategy, but you shouldn’t over think things or become paranoid. Good client communication is always important, but especially valuable in cases like these. By explaining the site’s many SEO faults, and how you plan to fix them, you can adjust your timeline to address poor performing keywords before making changes to riskier sections of the site. You may want to delay implementation on high value pages until a slow time in the buying cycle (like after Christmas) so your client doesn’t have a negative impression of your SEO credentials. This also gives you the opportunity to put the “bad” stuff back in place if your SEO isn’t doing the job. Ideally, the implementation of search engine optimization best practices should lead to even higher rankings on your client’s website, but a cautious approach is always best when a site is ranking for all the wrong reasons.