Making Mistakes And Learning From Them
I have had some harrowing times in the past during the building up phase my website. Experimenting, trying out new things with my limited knowledge and with whatever I’m learning from here, I have been lucky enough not to have wrecked my website till now. Usually as a habit, I carry out most things with utmost caution and mostly with a Plan B in place in the event of things not working out the way I had anticipated. There had been times when something I did in my website took me days to resolve or to get out of the mess I had created for myself.
But the best thing is, everytime I made a mistake, in trying to understand the ‘problem’, I learnt so many things that have only consolidated my knowledge. Sometimes an issue is not clear at the first instance but when the same type of problem crops up repeatedly, a pattern becomes evident that helps me zero down on the ways to tackle it. I have to make searches on my own to find the necessary resources required for the solution. Yet many things happen serendipitously. It is such a gratifying feeling when that happens.
Sometimes an issue is encountered and without knowing why it happened and what is means, it strikes you that it’s odd. But website building being such a hectic activity, we sometimes ignore a problem and instead of tackling the issue, wait for things to resolve on its own.
I had some 404 crawl errors on my site (page not found) and was aware that some residual links had remained when I changed my WordPress theme in between. However, my efforts in creating content kept my finding solution for it in abeyance for many days. I had two ways to get rid of it – either remove the URLs or redirect them properly elsewhere on my site. I employed both methods and now the crawl errors aren’t there.
However, one issue that disturbed me completely was the slipping rank of some of my pages from page 1 of Google into obscurity all of a sudden. This happened on two instances and I was determined to know the reason why. When I retraced back my steps in both pages, it became evident that the drop in the rankings was due to my overindulgence with new links on the pages after they had gone live and after they had nicely perched themselves on page 1 of Google with the on-page SEO. I have learnt it firsthand that editing a content sometimes badly affect your ranking for different search terms if it involves adding or removing links.
On the face of it, it looks like I had messed things up. But let me take the positives out of it. I will be more careful with how I edit my pages from now on. Cheers!
Recent Comments
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Hey buddy, that sounds great when you said you kept tweaking and searching all by yourself.
You've done a good post.
You have also gathered tons of information doing that, right?
Whenever you have doubt, do not hesitate to reach and we'll see if I can be of any help.
Ny point is, we can always take help from senior members.
Keep rocking.
I can afford to experiment because my site is new. I'm even thinking of deleting the post (and delete the URL in Google Webmaster Tools) that went down the rankings suddenly and repost it with new content minus the 'culprit' links I mentioned with a different title and permalink. I'm seriously thinking of doing it and see how it ranks.
Your lessons learned have also been valuable lessons for me. I also appreciate your persistence to find the root cause of errors encountered...to know why they occurred, the downstream impact, how to correct them, and how to avoid them in the future. Persistence pays off. The time spent to resolve the issues is invaluable in the long run...it is not ‘lost’ time.
Thank you for sharing. Your examples are very helpful training for others.
Keep on doing what you are doing. Success is inevitable!
Regards, Art
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It’s a big question, do people really learn from them? Some do? Life changes all the time, are we even making mistakes?
Wayne