Did Google…Screw Up?
At Classic Wines, one of our top keywords in Google search is “wine videos,” and therefore it is one that I keep a close eye on. You may recall I’ve had some keyword drama in the past (and I’m sure I will have more in the future), but something happened recently that had me completely perplexed.
On May 9th I came in to work and did my normal routine of analytics and organics checking. Everything was looking stable and normal, until I got to “wine videos.” I was expecting to see our normal standing at 3, which appears like this -
But instead, I got the unpleasant surprise of this -
We were gone! straight up. I did the first thing I think most people would do – I scrolled down to the bottom of the page to see how far we got dropped. When I didn’t see us, I reluctantly clicked to page 2, preparing myself for the bad news of being dropped out of the first page. Nothing there either. Astonished, I used Google’s advanced search function to check the top 100 sites that show up for “wine videos.” Nothing. Naturally I began crying and shaking my fist at the heavens.
Once I pulled myself together I tried to analyze what had actually happened. In my mind, there were only a few options -
1. This was a temporary reshuffling that would cure itself promptly. Just part of going with the flow for Google’s organics.
2. WE did something wrong by screwing up the tech back end or SEO text.
3. We were being penalized for content duplication or inappropriate incoming links.
4. Google screwed up (which is like saying Zeus screwed up).
The first thing I checked was possibility #2, that we screwed something up. We are constantly changing and adapting and improving, so these things happen from time to time. I retraced all of my own steps and got with my tech guys. Nothing changed in the videos portion of the site. So I crossed it off the list.
Next I checked for possible penalizations. I researched what has been peeving Google the most lately, and two things I definitely wanted to check is content duplication and links. We have small repeating elements of descriptors on our different video pages, but nothing at all that would be considered egregious. Furthermore, this would have been a very random time to penalize us on something that we’ve had up for awhile now. I also checked all the links coming into our site, making sure no one was black hatting us with a ton of porn links or anything like that. We were clean.
Lastly I called in a big gun – I got Wil Reynolds of ThinkSeer.com to analyze the situation along with me. He went through some more sophisticated technical analysis and told me that he also didn’t see anything unusual. It was, indeed, a mystery.
Ultimately I decided the only thing to do was file a reconsideration request, sit, and wait it out. I’ve been bumped around by Google before, and it usually rebounds (with a little coaxing). I had to hope this would do the same.
3 weeks went by with no change. Our “wine videos” keyword was m.i.a. and I couldn’t find our /wine-videos url on Google anywhere.
A little more time went by and our monthly company meeting came up. I was preparing my reports, and this situation was high among my priorities list to discuss. The very morning of the meeting, without warning, “wine videos” reappeared as if it had never left. It looked exactly the same as it had before, with exact same ranking, picture, text, and everything.
Quickly I opened back up my reports and added a final line – “nevermind – it’s back.”
Google it seems, in its infinite workings, had a little bit of a hiccup.
