Following on from Stu’s most excellent post about “Crap SEO Tips” (come on, we’ve all heard em!), I have been inspired to write a post about some of the worst SEO disasters ever to befall our comrades in the SEO Community!
We’ve all been there at some point in our SEO careers…that SEO project that you’ve been working on so hard for so long and the BOOM! Your world comes shattering down around you.
I’ve gathered a short list here of those travesties that make us shake in our very boots!

SEO Apocalypse #5
Client relaunching website with +8.000 URLs, after two weeks they wonder why traffic drops – 301-redirects? What is that? (Thanks @GrosenFriis)

SEO Apocalypse #4
“Can you help us? Just launched new website on an old domain and our site has simply dropped off Google altogether! We’re looking for an SEO agency to help us” Say, those look like “noindex” commands in the meta robots tag on each page…DOH! (Anonymous)

SEO Apocalypse #3
“I’d just taken over SEO internally on one of our websites, and noticed that traffic had dropped quite dramatically a few weeks previously. It was my job to find out exactly what happened and fix it. The explanation given was that we had perhaps suffered penalties due to some historical link activity, but further investigation showed this was unlikely. In the end, I discovered that 2 product pages had been merged (one containing content, and the other detailed price data), unfortunately the content was merged into the prices page which was previously noindexed. The result was that were now no product pages indexed! The change had been done to aid usability by making navigation easier for the user. Moral of the story? People responsible for usability aren’t always well educated in SEO – compensate for this by having a thorough sign-off procedure” (Thanks @Moxley)

SEO Apocalypse #2
One company added a rel canonical tag to every single page of their site pointing to the homepage. Google said “gee thanks” and removed every single page from the index except the homepage…(Thanks @tomcritchlow)

SEO Apocalypse #1
Hey, that site always ranks top for “keyword”, let’s copy their site…some months later when they approached us for SEO: “You’re going to need a new site…”  (Anonymous)

That’s it folks! If any of you have inspiring tales to tell then please do post your comments!

PS. Behold the Magnificence!

Stu’s new hairstyle: (Best pic I could get chaps!)