When Website Marketing Goes Wrong…

It’s the phonecall that all website marketers dread: "I can’t find my website on Google." Sometimes, they’re looking in the wrong place. Sometimes (as Forbes.com explains) it can mean that a business’s revenue stream has vanished overnight. There are several lessons to learn and pitfalls to avoid.

Why Does it Happen?

Google is diligently trying to monitor every single web page on the internet. That’s a whole heap of work (think billions of pages). To make life easier Google routinely filters out sites and pages that - in its opinion - offer little or no value.

The reasons for this can be manifold.

• Content duplicated from other sites.
• Low quality, nonsensical content packed with unnaturally frequencies of particular keywords.
• Poor uptime - the site is often offline when the Google spider comes round to visit
• No backlinks whatsoever.
• Thousands (or even millions) of backlinks from obvious spam sites.
• The site is rarely updated.
• The site is using various techniques in an attempt to ’cheat’ Google into thinking it is more important than it is.
• The site is associated with Phishing scams, malware and other banes of internet life.

The list goes on.

The Warning Signs

If you’ve hired a website marketing company, make sure they’re telling you everything. If they’re not prepared to tell you what they’re doing then they could be using ’unethical’ techniques to promote the site.

These practices are normally (but not always) attempts to use weaknesses in Google’s software to gain good rankings for keywords. In principle this is fine so long as it works. But if your site relies entirely on these loopholes for its rankings, then you’re running a big risk. Firstly, if Google closes whatever loophole your SEO company is taking advantage of, you could lose all your rankings overnight. Worse, Google might decide that your site is using spam techniques, and ban you from its listings altogether. Yikes.

Google freely publish their guidelines as to what kind of site they’re looking for. Their software isn’t perfect. Some people believe that Google’s statement is a self-serving lie anyway. We believe that the information is there and the safest bet is to treat it with respect.

There’s no doubt that there’s short term gains to be made from using tricksy methods to shortcut the rankings. But it’s also worth remembering that the techniques necessary to do this kind of work aren’t the kind of things that will add value to your site for a visitor.

What can you do about it if it happens?

If your site has been removed from the rankings - whether through misinformation (someone’s told you to do something that breaches Google’s guidelines) or on purpose (someone has taken your money and used loopholes to shortcut the rankings for a while) - your starting point should be: make things right.

• If you’ve got duplicate content from other sites: get rid of it.
• If your site belongs to a link farm: get out of it.
• If your site has content that is really nothing to do with your services: get rid of it.
• If pages of your site mysteriously bounce you to other pages, get rid of them.
• If the server your site uses is often down, change hosting provider.

Then, get down on your knees, grovel to Google to re-allow you back into their index and look at other ways to get your new content re-indexed.

Today’s Moral

Be good. Google have set some guidelines - play along with them. If you’ve hired a search engine company and they won’t tell you what they’re up to (a surprisingly common occurrence) then be mindful that they might be playing fast and loose with the rules. If they get it wrong - you’re the one who’ll be paying the price…