SEO Blitz

SEO folk spend a lot of their time building up certain keywords. They use linking strategies, content manipulation, and a host of other tactics to rank well in the words their research has deemed valuable. I am one of those SEO folk, and recently one of my top keywords dropped from 3rd place in Google to 9th. Let me share with you this terrible experience.

ClassicWines.com is a constantly growing site, and we have to stay flexible so as to grow and shift with our market. That flexibility means that our tech team has to adjust and rework their code often. In the past few weeks, some adjustments were needed in our index page, and through a slight mishap, the tags and titles for our index page were replaced with that of a different page on our site (the main articles page). The articles page was optimized through titles and tags for a completely different set of keywords, and when that setup was integrated into our index page (our most important and highly ranked page), unpleasantness ensued.

I have a routine every morning of checking analytics and page rank so as to monitor the fluctuations of SEO and to analyze if my recent activities have been effecting anything for good or bad. When I typed in ‘Wine Reviews’, I expected to see our page resting comfortably toward the top. It wasn’t. I slowly scrolled down, hoping to see it any point, and didn’t stumble upon it until I reached the bottom of the page. I retyped in ‘Wine Reviews’, thinking that maybe I had spelled it wrong. Or Google got confused. Or the moon was affected the tides. None of these things were happening…and we were still stuck down at #9.

I immediately began investigating the site to try and figure out what could have happened. I’ve been working on ‘red wines’ as a keyword lately, so I thought that might be related. Nothing weird there. Then I went to the index page and read at the top “Classic Wines | Wine Articles, Blogs, News, and Columns.” That was not right at all! It should have said “Classic Wines | Wine Ratings, Wine Prices, Wine Reviews.” Furthermore, the description underneath our website in google’s organic search had changed to describe our articles section.

After brief panic and head scratching, I got with our lead tech guy and he isolated the problem. After a quick fix, we were back to sending the right thing to Google. unfortunately, Wine Reviews did not jump back up. That will probably have to wait until Google re-runs their algorithm for ranking. I also may have to dig back into the labor of making us an authority for that keyword. Having to redo any accomplished work is not a fun prospect.

Just for fun – do a Google search for Wine Reviews right now, and see where we are at. Who knows, by the time you read this it could be different!