Darn you Google! We Love You Until We Hate You!

SEO is changing all the time. Trying to keep up with it is a full time job. (I should know) Knowing how to optimize your site and what to do on-site and off-site can be stressful at best. Not knowing why you don't show up can be irritating but being the top position and slipping away or off the grid entirely is infuriating.

This is exactly what happened today. 

Google is always trying to find new ways to get the top searched for items and sites into the hands of those that really want it. They put high regard on social media which is why it's crucial to post your articles and blogs on social media sites for faster indexing and better exposure. The goal is to be picked up by others and shared around the planet. Pinterest has done an awesome job of this by allowing your "stuff" to be seen and carried far beyond your sphere of influence and longer than most blog roll runs. 

Back links are another key component of a well-optimized site. You must have some back links, somewhere out there, there must be other sites with your link on them. The more Google finds your link, the higher your rank, your back link count and your traffic eventually.

Great content and knowledgeable information. People need to stay on your site once they are there. Give them something to read, to watch, to interact with. Without this and your bounce rate sky-rockets and people bounce off your site faster than bouncy ball on a trampoline.

So what happens when you have all these things and your site disappears?

This is what happened today.

One of our highest ranking sites with hundreds of thousands of back links, oodles of great content, social media to boot, and the top #1 spot on Google, dropped off the face of the internet.  Gone. Nadda. No Where. Not even indexed... you would have to physically type in their address to get to their site!

Well, after you panic a bit and try to calm your client down you run the gamut of theories as to why. 

With hours of research we discovered that a company called updowner.com picked up hundreds of our pages, duplicated them, linked back to them but because of their higher rank took over the content, implied it was their own, gave us 1,700 instant back links (which is a huge red flag on black hat techniques - they should be grown gradually, not hundreds in one day) and now all the content looks as if WE are the duplicating perpetrator. 

We did absolutely nothing to invite this company other than being on the top and easily accessible. It's the celebrity theory; if you are well-known you are more susceptible to being found and flagged. 

So now what do we do?

Unfortunately Google's webmaster tools may have actually been the culprit. Nothing is for sure and there are currently no violations according to their system. So we have to forcefully make Google come back and re-evaluate the site all over again. I have submitted their link again in the top two article websites for quick indexing but until Google finds this site acceptable again, who knows the outcome.

This can happen and you need to know what to do. Unfortunately there is not a perfect check list to get it all just right. You just work your butt off to get them noticed again. In the mean time we have set up coding on the site so this other company will not crawl our site any more. This should stop it from happening at least from this site. You have to add the site's IP address to the robot.txt file and edit the .htaccess file so that when a spider or person from the damaging site tries to get there from their site it gives an error. This prevents that one site from crawling.... but again, you don't know this until it happens.

But talk about stressful!!  Here we go again... Darn you Google! We love you until we hate you!