jwanchalkSEO Lessons
Many of you are familiar with the frustrating and prolonged issues that I had with a non-gaming site of mine. I would estimate 20 different people, all of whom I would consider more than knowledgeable on the topic, offered their suggestions and help. Finally, after about three months of messing with the site and looking for a solution that would fix the site up back to where it once was, things were settled. I hope this post will help someone in the future who is in the same situation that I was in.
First, the problem…
My site had previously been ranking somewhat decent for its primary term, but it wasn’t driving insane traffic or anything. I would say it was getting around 500-600 uniques per month. There were some longtails and other random traffic, but definitely nothing worth writing home about. I was hoping to get to work on expanding it and driving more significant traffic when the site suddenly vanished from Google search results altogether.
Now, onto analyzing the situation and looking for possible remedies…
I had no idea what was wrong, so I just hoped it was a temporary glitch and that it would be back in a few days. Much of the advice I initially received was heading in this same direction, which led me to ride it out for a few weeks. Needless to say, this didn’t do me any good.
An interesting twist…
Out of nowhere, the site suddenly jumped back into Google, ranking just as it was prior to the fallout. I was hoping that it was settled and that it could be chalked up to a Google mystery, but this was hardly the case. The site would end up dropping from search results a few days later. This pattern would repeat itself until the solution was found. The site would be in Google for 5-10 days, out for 5-10 days, and so on and so forth. This was important information because it all but guaranteed that the site was suffering from an automatic penalty induced by Google’s algorithm as opposed to a manual penalty.
First attempt at fixing the site proactively…
Instead of sitting around and waiting for the site to fix itself, so to speak, I decided to go out and get listed in the Yahoo directory. This came as a suggestion from a few PAL members and others who suggested it in private. $300 is a lot for a one year link in any directory, but I figured it was more than worth the relatively small investment in the grand scheme of things. The site did end up showing in the SERPS a few days after I made it into the directory, but this was nothing more than a coincidence that coincided with the usual in and out patterns that it had been experiencing.
Trying again, this time with a new approach…
The next thing I tried was cleaning up the site in order to have a less “salesy” tone, as suggested by RR among others. I re-wrote the homepage entirely, de-optimized the title tags, and just about anything else I could to let Google know that I wasn’t a spam site. Despite eventually changing almost every page on the site in one way or another, I couldn’t find a solution.
A last ditch effort…
At this point I had all but given up, figuring that the site was more of a hassle than it was worth. Since I had just about nothing to lose, I decided to toss around 15 pages from the site that I didn’t consider all that high on the quality scale. Though I didn’t really think this was a viable solution, I figured that it couldn’t hurt.
Because there are no last ditches…
I originally planned on just selling the site if this didn’t work, but I refused to give up on it. I received the best advice, in that it worked, from one of the best SEOs that I know. No one here knows him, I will never share some of the great tips that he has given me, but he found the remedy to my problem. Along the lines of the de-optimize route that RR and SB suggested, my friend told me to toss the bad anchor text I had across the site. I had been linking to all of my articles, site wide, repeating one particular word in virtually every title. I cut this out, lightened up on the heavy anchor text, and the site popped back into Google. It actually went in and then back out, but a day later it stuck and it has been solid for awhile now. The traffic actually returned about 2x better than before, which was certainly an added bonus.
I am more than glad that I stuck with it and was ultimately able to get this site back to where it should be. While I hope that I never have to deal with something this frustrating again, it definitely taught me a lot more than it cost me.
Here is a screenshot of the Analytics that I installed about a month and a half before it was fixed. This does not cover the entire period, but it is enough to paint a picture of what was going on. You will notice the in and out patterns, a sharp spike, a sharp dive, and then steady traffic from there on out.
