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Pogo said it well … “We have found the enemy and he is us.”
By admin | September 5, 2008
I had a client a while back who utilized a webmaster, who is a friend of his. This young lad was very ambitious and was learning HTML and web design. When my client found this out he coupled his business with his friend and allowed him to create his web presence.
Eventually he realized the potential of the web and that his website, although online, was not producing the traffic, or profit, he knew was available to him.
He became a client and I proceeded to optimize his site … or perhaps I should term that … tried to optimize his site.
His young friend was quite “broken nosed” about having someone else come in and make changes. After a few things were done I realized none of my changes were live and online. This isn’t all that unusual as many clients will not realize I have made changes and overwrite them from their local PCs. Crazy as it sounds, that is pretty much a normal experience.
But upon investigation I discovered that his webmaster had removed my changes because … “they didn’t like the way it looked”. Well, I really didn’t change the looks much, but I had added nice stuff like meta tags and good title tags. The webmaster insisted that the title of the page should be different than I had optimized it to be, and changed it back. He also convinced my client that I was doing things all wrong.
It took some doing but I eventually convinced my client that I was the one doing things correctly. To make a long story short, we went back and forth like this for an entire five months. Eventually the client called in very angry stating that his site can’t be found for his important keywords and he wants a refund.
I had made change after change after change to the site only to have it changed back.
At this point, I told my client that I wanted to revamp his entire site throwing it out and recreating it. It was really crap and really needed this revamp. I just plainly told him that his webmaster was not a designer or webmaster and it was his fault, entirely!, that his site is not optimized today and is still not producing results for him.
After several days of bantering back and forth, he allowed me complete access to update, change, revamp or redesign … whatever I wanted and promised that his webmaster would not step in and make changes.
I proceeded and made some good headway. After several weeks he started getting some listing, I could see on my reports that the site was improving. I was happy. The client, unfortunately, wasn’t, mainly because he had spent a lot of money and still wasn’t making the amount of profit from the site as he really should be. I remember him complaining to me two days after he gave me the go ahead that he still didn’t see results or his site listed in the SERPs. LOL!
I finished my changes to the site and created a very basic site (I’m not a designer either, that’s for sure), that was optimized well and had everything in place to do well. I worked at some inbound links and released an article to the article directories.
At this point the campaign was cancelled and the client went away, and I kept a back-burner eye on the campaign. I had a more serious look at it this morning after noticing that “all” of the listings I had earned from my work were now gone. He now has “zero” results showing up in the reports. A huge and fatal loss to his online business.
I went to the site to have a look. I viewed the source code and compared it to my own, the last pages I had uploaded. Lots of things were changed, but most annoyingly, all of the title tags were changed. The title tag keywords are now gone, many code optimization techniques have been overwritten/changed or just plain deleted. Important heading tags altered, and not within the scope of what I was trying to accomplish.
So … I guess the webmaster now feels like he is back in control of things, and the site is looking like it is one of his creations.
And it is … it’s called … failure.
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