Happy Christmas Google
Tags: google, search engine optimisation
If you could send a Christmas card to the founders of Google, would you bother, if you would - what would you say? Would the sentiment be kind or otherwise? In 2008 have they helped your business, or rained on your parade.
I think many Christmas cards from webmasters and small business owners alike might read something like this…..(feel free to post your own too)
Happy Christmas Google,
Another year nearly over, doesn’t it just fly? Just a short note to say thanks for your help promoting my business over the last 12 months, my website ranks well on a range of search terms, except for those with any commercial significance to my business.
Actually we used to do reasonably well in your excellent search engine, appearing on page 1 for a couple of relevant terms that sent us some good traffic and sales. Overnight, and not for the first time, we disappeared out of your index; our website traffic disappeared and a chunk of our turnover went with it. You guys… we never know what you’re going to do next! Actually, I say disappear - we didn’t; we’re still in your index, just on page 214 - I’m always exagerating.
Normally when this happens, we’d chuck a wad of money at Google Adwords, and waste a few hundred more hours trying to make our website work better with Google, but that would be too easy. Been there done that where’s the fun.
So a few months back we decided we’d revisit your excellent webmaster guidelines, and make sure our website complied 100%. They are written in English aren’t they? Just checking as they’re so straightforward and on the face of it our website was already pretty much compliant as far as we could tell. I thought we must be missing something - we made a few tweaks here and there anyway.
Anyway, as suddenly as we disappeared, our website was back in the SERPs again - only on page 9 rather than page 1 this time. Would we have been back on page 1 if we hadn’t made those tweaks….there’s a mindbinder the Matrix movie would have been proud of!
So as we enter a new year, we know we’re following your guidelines to the letter, we’re evangelising them to our partners, suppliers and clients basically anyone who’ll listen - fighting the good fight - don’t do SEO, build a great site, don’t spam search engines; doorway pages bad ug… you get the picture…they think we’re mad!
The remarkable thing is the impact this whiter than white approach has had on our position in your results; we now rank lower than most of our competitors, many of whom only appear to be in the results through the use of doorway pages, duplicate content etc etc. Still keeps us on our toes, it’s not like we’ve anything else to be worrying about.
We thought we’d try your “report spam” facility - doing the right thing to let you know that some websites were employing dubious techniques. It made no difference whatsoever so we must have filled in the report incorrectly otherwise you’d have acted - wouldn’t you?
We know we’ve lost business to these guys too;losing business to companies that are only in the running in the first place through the use of spammy SEO. Hmm, adopting a philosophical approach as well as a lot of beer helps here.
I’m sure we’ll get our reward for playing a straight bat in 2009 - lets hope we’re still around to reap the benefit eh?
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
A Small
Business Owner
December 25th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
Great blog. Just stumbled here late on Christmas day - but I’ll definitely be back - - Happy new year to all