- Joined
- Jul 18, 2012
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- 482
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I had a client I worked with briefly a couple months ago. I had to make a few minor tweaks to his home page. I'm not a developer myself so I have to outsource most development work. Fortunately, I've assembled a great team of developers over the years. At any rate, I had one of my developers work on this basic project but something went horribly wrong. When he worked on the changes to the home page on his test domain, he put a meta tag in the header that prevented any search engines from indexing the page. Then when he moved the newly tweaked page to the client's domain, he forgot to remove the meta tag.
Because the new home page couldn't be indexed, the client lost all of their rankings - but the client didn't catch this until about 30 days after the fact. The client calls me panicking that they lost all their rankings and they have no clue what's going on. They want to hire me to do ongoing SEO for them.
The fact that their home page fell off the face of the earth didn't make sense so the first thing I did was have one of my ace developers take a look at the site. He spotted the meta tag immediately. I didn't even have to ask the developer that worked on it what happened because I knew. He screwed up by not removing the meta tag
The following conversation with the client wasn't the most comfortable thing to do but I had to do the right thing. I took full responsibility for the mistake and apologized. And of course it goes without saying I had the problem fixed without charging the client. I was fully expecting the client to either yell at me or possibly threaten a law suit. Instead, the client appreciated my honesty and appreciated the fact that I was able to get the issue fixed immediately. Because of how I handled everything, they rewarded me with a new development project!
I tell this story not to brag about me but to demonstrate that being honest and taking responsibility in difficult situations can lead to good things. Some consultants in my position may have been scared of the potential consequences and may have been tempted to lie or pass the blame to some unknown developer. While situations like this are unpleasant and cause a few sleepless nights (which this deal did for me), you need to buck up, be a "man" and take responsibility. If you do the right thing, good things will happen. I think they call it karma
Travis Van Slooten
P.S. If you're wondering what happened with the client's rankings, I got lucky. After being out of the Google index for 30+ days, I was worried sick their rankings were going to be lost for good. Luckily, the client's rankings came back literally within 48 hours.
Because the new home page couldn't be indexed, the client lost all of their rankings - but the client didn't catch this until about 30 days after the fact. The client calls me panicking that they lost all their rankings and they have no clue what's going on. They want to hire me to do ongoing SEO for them.
The fact that their home page fell off the face of the earth didn't make sense so the first thing I did was have one of my ace developers take a look at the site. He spotted the meta tag immediately. I didn't even have to ask the developer that worked on it what happened because I knew. He screwed up by not removing the meta tag
The following conversation with the client wasn't the most comfortable thing to do but I had to do the right thing. I took full responsibility for the mistake and apologized. And of course it goes without saying I had the problem fixed without charging the client. I was fully expecting the client to either yell at me or possibly threaten a law suit. Instead, the client appreciated my honesty and appreciated the fact that I was able to get the issue fixed immediately. Because of how I handled everything, they rewarded me with a new development project!
I tell this story not to brag about me but to demonstrate that being honest and taking responsibility in difficult situations can lead to good things. Some consultants in my position may have been scared of the potential consequences and may have been tempted to lie or pass the blame to some unknown developer. While situations like this are unpleasant and cause a few sleepless nights (which this deal did for me), you need to buck up, be a "man" and take responsibility. If you do the right thing, good things will happen. I think they call it karma
Travis Van Slooten
P.S. If you're wondering what happened with the client's rankings, I got lucky. After being out of the Google index for 30+ days, I was worried sick their rankings were going to be lost for good. Luckily, the client's rankings came back literally within 48 hours.
