When I first started drafting out my next presentation, I knew I needed to get at some cool standout case studies. Home Depot made the short list, naturally.
Household brand and instantly recognisable in the US? Check – Huge authority online? Check. Ecommerce site? You guessed it!
To make a talk memorable, you need real-world examples
All good, memorable talks feature quotes, insights and case studies (if you can get them) to really validate and authenticate your points in the real world.
So naturally, I fired up homedepot.com and boy – I did not take long to find a beast of an issue!
To quickly highlight broken or dead links on a page in my web browser (or links that trigger 301s/302s), I use a cool Chrome plugin called ‘Check My Links’.
In summary it highlights all links on a page. Green links return a healthy 200 response code, any other colour less so. Red of course flagging dead 4xx/5xx codes.
So after firing up check my links, here’s what it showed me:
Yup – a massive and literal red flag on a global footer to link to their Canadian site. My first thought? No way! Their Canadian site can’t be dead, right? Maybe it’s just a bad link or the plugin isn’t reporting correctly…
Still in denial at this point, I thought I’d been blocked…
After pounding through their site with a crawler – I assumed I’d just had my IP address and/or device blocked due to my crawling activity. So I fired up my mobile instead making sure I wasn’t on wi-fi and I got the same exact status code.
Here’s what I tried next:
- Different homedepot.ca URLs
- Tried adding https in to the URL to be sure it’s not a non-secure issue
- Tried another two browsers
- Tried a second mobile phone
- Heck I even tried changing my user-agent to Googlebot and then Bingbot just in case..
Nope, still got the same access denied image. I even ran through all of this list again TWO DAYS later and still, dead. Nothing.
Home Depot Canada are still in business, right?
Well, yeah! At least according to their knowledge graph, SERPs on Google and their Twitter account. Their last tweet was posted just 2 days prior to me starting to write this post and homedepot.ca is still the domain listed on their Twitter profile.
They’re still ranking #1 for the search term ‘Home Depot Canada’ too.
How’s all this impacting Home Depot?
Well, in store – I’ve no idea. But online, it looks like it’s causing a shit-storm. Check out this cliff-edge of a drop according to Sistrix for homedepot.ca in the UK:
What’s super-confusing is all is well according to Sistrix visibility mobile data in Canada:
This now looks like a bad case of international SEO and less like a global issue
Although I can’t verify it (shout out to anyone that can recommend an extension or plugin to spoof my location as Canada), these SEO disasters only appear to be impacting countries outside of Canada; with the UK being one of the worst affected.
So what dude, it’s a Canadian site and you’re not in Canada?
True – but that’s no reason to hard-block visitors outside of the dominant country. I could be a Canadian away on vacation wanting to place an order for when I’m home, for example.
Also, I can’t verify whether this is the case – but if Googlebot/Bingbot are crawling from outside of Canada, it’s going to make SEO and site discovery a major challenge.
Blocking non-Canadian originating traffic is narrow-minded, very short sighted and is a pretty dangerous strategy too.
If I reside in the UK, (which I do) and wanted to link out to them, I can’t. Equally, if someone else has and I want to check out that link – I can’t see it.
So, Home Depot, if you’re reading this…
You’ve got some shit you need to fix and here’s what I’d recommend to do just that:
1) Little Warden App – this is a great, potentially catastrophe-avoiding bit of kit. Put simply, Little Warden alert you to web and SEO issues as soon as they happen. For example domain name expiration, 4xx and 5xx issues, content amends and more.
2) Hire a UX specialist – Firing a 403 error when traffic is from outside of Canada is a pretty bad user experience. This can be handled much better with a clear and open design, messaging and allowing a user to make the choice as to which region they’d like to see rather than making that for them
3) Hire an international SEO / hreflang expert – Again, don’t blind-block traffic from outside Canada and instead get them to select their country on entry and action from there. Last but not least – Invest in a solid hreflang strategy and integration.
4) Invest in a Sistrix subscription – My personal favourite SEO SaaS tool for auditing overall SEO health with their awesome visibility index down to granular keyword performance and much more. FYI, the SEO screenshot graphs above were taken from Sistrix.
Now I’m no specialist on how Googlebot works and whether it crawls from multiple locations outside of the US – but blocking bots by region isn’t going to do you any favours when it comes to SEO.
5) Finally, for God’s sake, get your SEO team working with your webdev team – I’ve a strong suspicion that I wouldn’t have even needed to write this post if your two teams were frequently and continually engaged in one another’s roadmaps and workflows.
For an even more effective web team structure, your most senior dev should probably be a well-seasoned SEO too. This will really help to gel the two separate teams together from the get go, really enforce the collaborative culture and break down those silos.
No good SEO would allow this brute-force block to happen. Equally, nor would any good UX and anyone with any sort of responsibility to users and customers.
Home Depot, I hope this helps – equally, I hope it helps others too
International SEO is hard. I’m sure Home Depot have some real and tangible reasons for making these changes, but clearly, it’s not without consequence. There are better ways to direct traffic away from the .ca domain without a brute force block to those who are visiting from outside of Canada; even if you don’t have a offering or sell in a country where web traffic is origination from.
Customers must always be at the epicentre of all technology changes regardless of size. Clearly this recent move from Home Depot isn’t and in the medium to long-term, it could be costing them sales, customers and online visibility.
Put simply, this is a classic case of webdev not being customer centric. Home Depot can do better. We all can.
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