Duplicate content, hijacked search console, crawl errors, ACCCK.

[beth_thesomersteam]

My company employed a national marketing company to create their site, which was obviously outsourced to the lowest bidder. It looks beautiful, but has a staging site with all duplicate content in the installation. I am not seeing these issues in search console, and have had no luck getting the staging site removed from the files. How much should I be banging the drum on this? We have hundreds of high level crawl errors and over a thousand in midlevel.

Of course I was not around to manage the build. I also do not have ftp access

I'm also dealing with major search console issues.

The account is proprietarily owned by a local SEO company and I can not remove the owner who is there by delegation.

The site prefers the www version and does not read the same traffic for the non www version

We also have something like 90,000 backlinks from 13 sites.

And a shit ton of ghost spam.

Help!

[BradsDeals]

I have so many questions about this arrangement.

First of all, the third party ownership of the Search Console (and GA too, maybe?) is a massive red flag. Account ownership should always ALWAYS be handled in house. You need to insist on that, and insist loudly and furiously. It's extremely shady for a third-party SEO to own the accounts since it lets them hold the site and its data hostage if the relationship sours. How easy would it be for people who aren't even part of your company to use Search Console to start removing important URLs from the index? What happens to your data if you end the contract? Do they also own your analytics? Could they cut off your access to your own data on a whim? Replace your site with a page telling the world what awful clients you are? Depending on the size and type of company you are, letting an outsider own that access could be a very real threat to your business with the potential to do significant damage.

Also, what exactly is the local SEO company's role here? Why aren't THEY worrying about referral spam and questionable backlinks? If they're not, then what are they being paid to do?

If you don't have FTP access, who does? Does your company actually own the site? Is there a contract that spells it out?

For the staging site, all you should need is to make sure it's excluded from indexing via robots.txt. We have had multiple staging sites that, if indexed, would put some crazy dupe content into the world, but that's what the robots.txt is for. Set and forget. Well, check on it periodically, since you don't seem to have any actual control over what these guys are doing and the account ownership thing makes me very wary of trusting them to get it right and keep it that way.

As for the ghost spam, there's been a ton of discussion about it in the community over the last year. On Moz alone, there's this piece from March, and this one from August, plus a bunch of forum discussions. Bottom line is that there isn't much you can do to stop it, but that doesn't mean you're stuck with seeing it muck up your data.

[beth_thesomersteam]

Ok, so it's TWO companies.

One is the marketing company that provides the website, the other is a local SEO company that created just the www version of our search console.

We own the domain, but the marketing company has the only access to the website files/ hosting. I'm guessing we are on a shared server with their other clients, so we will not get access. They have front end people on the team, but no understanding of SEO whatsoever. When I came on there was no sitemap or robots file submitted to search console, for example.

As far as the Search Console issue, I actually have a friend at that company there that told me their setup is proprietary. We no longer have a relationship with that company, and the owner of our company was also an owner on Search Console. I managed to remove all the reps from this company by unverifying, so that is no longer a problem! Maybe you helped me in spirit. I tried to do this a few times before and didn't find the way, but right after your response I did.

So now at least, the only issue is with the duplicate staging site and the ghost spam. I'd really prefer that the company take the staging files down. My employers paid a to of money for this site and are paying a large monthly retainer. At the very least we should have a clean build. It's over 4,000 duplicate pages, so I think that is going to have to be on them.

As far as ghost spam, I'll read the articles and get er done.

Thank you so much for your thoughtful response.

[RuthBurrReedy]

I'm glad you were able to sort out part of your issue, and it sounds like there's hope for it all to get fixed! The only thing I would add is to make sure you get a promise in writing that should you part ways with the company that's hosting the site, they will transfer the site to a host of your choosing and hand over the keys.

[beth_thesomersteam]

Yes, thank you so much, I will. What I'm concerned about is how bad this was in the first place. The way this company markets themselves is completely out of line with with the state of the build and the advice they give my employers. My bosses LOVE these guys because they are supposedly #technology #experts that do national speaking engagements about #success

What I see from them is mostly paid product endorsements, outsourced workforce, and #broisms on social media.

They're fast talking sales people that are delivering a product to people who don't understand what they are getting (or not getting) under the hood.