24 hours ago, I owned 1st place positioning for half a dozen search terms on a website I launched on Thursday. The homepage was the only page indexed, but the case study was unbelievable.
I was so blown away at how fast the SEO work I did took effect that I blogged about the success and I linked to Google’s search results pages for the terms I had been targeting.
Today I checked the ranking and the site was un-indexed totally gone from Google’s index. There’s two ways to respond to such an SEOÂ calamity: panic and be depressed about the incident or understand what happened and learn from it.Here are some possibilities:
- Too many clicks too soon from Google’s search results
- My blog and the client’s website share an IP
- An unpublicized formula within the algorithm, which makes null relevancy if X percentage of clicks originated from a link to a search query.
Google’s indexing “trick” might be a loophole in how new websites submitted are scored. This being the case, if you are keeping a close eye on what your top competitors are doing and identify the core search terms they are targeting on a newly-launched website, it’s possible that a few dozen links to Google’s search results and a few dozen clicks through those links from multiple IP’s might be what it takes to lower (possibly remove) a competitor’s web address. Just a possibility.Â
So, that leaves us with the consequences. To avoid total banishment (or six months of sandboxing), I removed the blog post, submitted a Link Removal Request in Google’s Webmaster Tools, and said some prayers.
Let’s see how long it takes to get back in Google’s good graces for my client’s website. I’ll create a new post when the site returns to the index so we can see how long it takes to gain back the little bit of relevancy I earned when I first started the off-page SEO campaign. (However, this time I won’t be linking to Google to prove it).
Blah.
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