An interesting story has emerged from the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Dallas last year.
Every day around the world, millions of Internet users use search engines to look up Web sites and the information they contain. Every day SEO specialists struggle with the ever changing criteria that search engines use to keep their sites visible and well indexed. Generally, to the more enlightened, this is regarded as time well spent. Who can afford not to be found online when search engines generate vast numbers of visitors on a daily basis?
Search engines are a Web site owners best friend and reward generously those who take the time to understand how they work. At least that's how it's meant to work!!
Imagine your surprise then, if you were the owner of a world leading Web site, one with a vast Internet presence, and you suddenly discovered, it's like you don't exist anymore, your company has been wiped off the Internet map.
Well it happened to the giant e-retailer www.wine.com. And it's been the same for nearly a year.
The search engine Google dropped over 9,000 of Wine.com's pages over a 6 month period.
A search engine engineer was called in to look at the problems and soon realised that Wine.com had some SEO management issues that needed addressing. These included some "accidental" spamming techniques, that would ordinarily be frowned on when used by anyone else (but the term used was "accidental" spamming and not designer spamming). It was concluded that the angry "Googlebot" dumped their listing because of these "accidents".
In Wine.com's defence, they have acquired other sites and so what with mirror site domains, an excess of pop-ups and pages with invisible text on them (background and text the same colour) it was felt that it was time for a shake-up.
All the changes have taken place, a complete rethink using proper "Keyword research", along with the creation of specific titles and descriptions for each page. In other words, proper SEO intervention through research, remodelling and hard work.
Wine.com's management eagerly await the arrival of "Googlebot" to reindex the site and accept it for listing.
There are no guarantees this will happen anytime soon!
I know all this seems hard to believe, but I've got the proof right here. A screen shot of a link popularity search done on 6 March 2003 for a problem that seemed to start sometime between January and June 2002. By Christmas 2002 Wine.com was down to 1 page in Google.
This just goes to prove that even the big players aren't immune from the wrath of the spiders.
The moral of this story, is, it's wiser to play by the rules when it comes to search engines. All the new tricks and spamming techniques quickly become so prevalent that it's easy for the search engines to spot them and change the way they interpret pages and listing relevancy. Equally important are the methods used when site redesigns and domain name changes are taking place, not to upset the indexing engine who seems to have sole discretion over your relevance and placement.
Communication between the various elements of an Online business are paramount to its success and that include the vital areas of Search Engine Optimization. Successful marketing campaigns are the result of constant research into keyword phrases and all the other optimization techniques mentioned that go into attracting the search engine robots to your site, without frightening them away again. I'd like to help you achieve this goal and more details are available by clicking here.
