If you are currently annoyed, angry, frustrated, feeling utterly miserable and helpless – about having a website recently dumped down the Google rankings, then perhaps you can now take at least some heart from what I’m about to tell you. Listen up…
I set up a website around 9 months ago now. It was an MFA (made for AdSense) site – quickly set up the site, quickly added some content, quickly started the backlinking process, and voila – job done – a few top ten rankings within weeks, literally! And this was an EMD also (EMD = exact match domain name to a half decent keyword phrase in this particular case), although the kwd that the exact match is to only gets around 600 or 700 searches a month in Google according to Google stats, so the ranking of the EMD would hardly make me a millionaire over night.
Well, as it happens, the rankings did appreciate rather quickly – in fact, this niche has become popular over the past couple of years or so, so I was in fact surprised at just how quickly the rankings did materialize. I think in its hay-day, the website had about 6 of the 8 kwds I was targeting in top 10 and that came about within around 10 weeks of me buying the domain name. Yup – that was surprising!
Mind you, there was only one higher end kwd phrase with around 10k global search a month in Goog (according to Goog stats), where in the main, the rest of the kwds attracted anything between 500 and 3000 searches a month. So even though AdSense pays fairly well on this niche, the competition is still not particularly high end due to a fairly low geared search volume on the whole.
Okay, so there I was, happily moving up through the rankings for all my kwd phrases after only about 10 weeks, and the income was appreciating in tandem. Nothing huge by any means, but for example – one week may have seen 8 bucks, the next week saw 11 bucks, then then next 15 bucks and so on – you get the idea – the rise in income was gentle, but it was a definite rise all the same and ROI (return on investment) was good and looking better all the time.
But guess what – around about week 12 – 14, Goog did what they do and dumped all my rankings. The only ranking to stay in the top 30 was the EMD keyword phrase. All the rest plummeted out of the top 100. Thus the penalty was fairly harsh – site wide, as opposed to page or kwd “wide”. The site was of course still indexed in Google, so things could have been worse, but they were bad enough.
And yeah, I probably deserved it – I’ll come clean. I got greedy, and I wanted more, more, MORE!!! And I got a bit slap happy with my backlinking processes I guess. Silly boy – never learn!
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