Helping An Old Client – Friday Funny

I am having a great Friday morning.  I am truly giggling myself to death.  Why you ask?  Well because I did the right thing and was a nice guy and showed someone how 35,000 of their backlinks were accidentally misplaced.  I could have ignored it but I decided to pass it on as free advice besides I found it very funny that a mistake this big would not have been caught by themselves.

So I told my former contact at that company (let’s call him Bob) that they implemented a javascript redirect instead of a 301 redirect when they rebranded to a new domain name and it is causing them indexing issues.  Bob naturally freaked out and started making calls.  The next day Bob tells me that it is not as big an issue as they originally thought and thanked me for letting them know.  Huh?  Bob seemed too calm.

I was not sure Bob understood the situation properly.  Yea it is a not a site wide problem (old domain has over 120,000 links).  It is an isolated problem that is much smaller.  It only impacts one page that has only 35,000 links.  I guess you could call me an alarmist because I would not be calm if 35,000 links was not properly redirected.  So I called Bob and I was explaining the sitatuation to make sure Bob understood it fully I stumbled across another anomaly on a different company site. 

On a seperate domain his company had properly implemented a 301 redirect except it pointed to a 302 which then redirected to a 302 which then redirected to a third 302 before it finally hit the proper destination page.  For some reason i find that long trail of redirects very funny.  I would not use it as an example of the best way to handle old backlinks when you move to a new domain