Employee Reviews Directory: Completing a Platform After a CMS Migration
A public directory of companies with employee reviews: working links, spam protection and moderation after a move from an older CMS
NDA Covered
About the project
- Client: an employer reviews directory (under NDA)
- Industry: Online directories and reviews
- Timeline: 2017–2024
- Technologies: PHP, Yii2, jQuery, Bootstrap, reCAPTCHA, SEO redirects, moderation tools
- Team: web developers and a project manager
The client runs a public directory of companies where employees leave reviews, rate employers and file complaints. The site had moved from an older CMS to a custom build, but the move was not finished: links had changed, spam filled the forms, and the admin panel had bugs. The client needed a team that could take over the code and finish the job.
So we started from a list of open problems on the client's task board, and the first goal was simple: make the site work again for visitors and for search engines.
What we delivered
THE CHALLENGE
- Company links changed.
- Search engines saw 404 errors.
- Spam in every form.
- Bugs in the admin panel.
THE SOLUTION
- Links and redirects fixed.
- reCAPTCHA on public forms.
- Moderation tools repaired.
- Media restored from a backup.
THE OUTCOME
- Working company links.
- Spam under control.
- A usable admin panel.
- Support until 2024.
A review site lives on trust and traffic: broken links and spam cost both.
Links, redirects and search traffic
After the migration, company pages lived on new addresses, and the old ones returned a 404 error. Search engines were losing pages. In addition, some company pages had received a third address pattern during the move.
For this reason, we compared the old and the new URL structures and found out why only some companies were affected. We fixed the links of the affected companies and added redirects, and then we looked for similar companies. As a result, visitors from search reached the right company page again.
Spam protection that does not stop real people
The site received a lot of spam through the review, company and complaint forms. A hidden-field check worked on some forms, but it failed on others and sometimes rejected real visitors.
The client noticed the effect first: the number of new reviews fell from about 15 a day to almost none. Meanwhile, we moved the forms to reCAPTCHA. A page with several forms needed a special set-up, because a standard widget does not work twice on one page. Finally, we skipped the check for logged-in users, because they are not robots, and kept it for everyone else.
Reviews, moderation and verification
The directory shows positive, neutral and negative reviews on separate tabs, and pagination had to work on each tab. We worked through the switcher and the pagination of these tabs.
Administrators receive complaints and requests to confirm company management in the admin panel. We worked on the download of attached files in the verification section and on the emails about these requests.
Media, IP addresses and the old site
The first server kept all visitors behind one address, so every review showed the same IP. We changed the server set-up so that the real address reached the application.
We also restored the media folder from the old version of the site, after we found a backup on the hosting.
What turned out to be hard
- A migration without a map. Nobody had a list of changed addresses, so we checked the companies one by one and looked for similar cases.
- Spam versus real visitors. A strict filter cut spam but also cut reviews, and a bug in the forms for logged-in users had to be fixed too.
- Several forms on one page. reCAPTCHA needed a custom set-up for pages with more than one form.
- Lost files. The files and the database of the old site were hard to find, and a backup on the hosting saved the media.
Result of the project
We finished the migration in 2017 and kept supporting the site with small tasks until 2024. The platform is still in operation today.
Looking for help with a migration or a review platform? See our custom web app development or read how we built a marketplace with an interactive map. We used reCAPTCHA for the forms.
Need to rescue or finish a web platform? Tell us about your task.
SEE MORE OUR CASE STUDIES
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