A Naive Mistake
Cost Me My Google Rankings
Little do you know but you too could be making mistakes with
your website that are costing you your search engine rankings.
Goggle and the other search engines are constantly changing
their algorithms to keep pace of search engine spammers. Some
novice website owners may be like me and be making big mistakes
in the eyes of the search engine bots which will lower their
search engine ranking or blot their website right out of existence
from everyone except those people that have been given their
website URL.
Let me tell you my mistakes and what I've learned from them...
In 2000, I started a small research vineyard. Soon I wanted
a website to tell people about it, advise others how to grow
grapes, and get my research information out to the public.
I was on a shoe-string budge so I learned HTML myself. My
website was quickly posted to one of those "free" website
hosts. Two months later, my website was hitting the top "5"
in the search engine rankings for all of my keywords. I had
lots of relevant content which made this possible. I was in
heaven!
I soon realized that the free web host didn't provide all
that a webmaster wants (cgi-bin, commerce, etc). I found a
better host provider at a reasonable price and I moved my
website. Big Mistake #1: I didn't
remove the pages from the free website host. I figured with
time, that host would see no activity and just drop me from
their server to make more room for other websites. Little
did I know how long that free website would persist on the
Internet. Big Mistake #2: This one
is much like the first one, just done in a different manner.
After three years, I got tired of my website's appearance.
I had learned CSS and wanted to make my website more uniform
and professional looking. Slowly, I began transitioning my
pages to the new look. Since the search engines knew the old
pages, I simply left them on the backend of my website, while
naming the new pages differently and more google friendly.
Little did I know at the time the search engines would spider
both the new and the old pages now.
I really didn't know that I was doing anything wrong. When
I checked my search engine rankings, I still ranked very high.
I should have paid more attention and noticed that sometimes
it was the new pages that ranked up there but often it was
the old pages. They had been there all along and still commanded
those high search engine rankings. Once in a while I even
saw some of the old pages from the free web host days.
I guess I was only concerned about my search engine rankings,
not which pages, new or old were being indexed. After all,
as long as my site was getting noticed, And traffic was coming
to my website so why care? Big Mistake #3:
I wanted to put up more relative content in the form of articles
related to growing grapes and win on my website. I though
this would help my search engine rankings for some keywords
I was low in and also help my website visitors.
I purchased a program named "Article Equalizer" to make this
task easier on myself. Being a new user of this program, I
began to use this software with the templates that came with
the program. It seemed to work well and produced the results
I wanted.
Little did I know that by using the built-in templates that
came with this software, a "finger print" would be placed
in the resulting pages that would identify that I used this
program to generate the index to the article and the article
pages themselves. Mistake #4: To aggravate
the above mistake, I loaded the index page to the back end
of my website. This index page was a collection of hyperlinks,
no content, just links.
Goggle drastically changed its algorithm early in the year
2005. The unthinkable happened. Not only did my search engine
rankings drop, they disappeared altogether. I wasn't even
in Google. Google had treated me as a search engine spammer!
I had lost my top rankings and now wasn't even indexed.
I had violated Googles new rules. I learn a lot from my mistakes.
What rules did I violate? First, I had multiple pages of the
same content all over the web and my own website. Google says,
"Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with
substantially duplicate content." Boy, had I done that. And
without even knowing it. I had links up on the search engines
that lead to multiple pages on my own site and to my old free
one.
I had created pages that had multiple links that lead back
to my main page through my article directory index. I know
it looked like I was spamming Google but it was just a naive
mistake, compounded through the software that was going to
save me time.
Naive mistakes can cost you everything when you're running
up against google. My laziness cost me. I didn't erase what
I had created before and had used a program to save me some
time.
I've remedied my mistakes but am yet to be found in Google.
They are unforgiving in that respect but I believe that I
will soon be back in their good graces. Learn from my mistakes
and don't make them. If you have disappeared from Google,
you might want to check and see if you too have made some
naive mistakes like I did. Change your website to conform
to Google's guidelines and then re-submit your site. If that
doesn't work. You'll have to start all over with a new domain
name. And that can be a painful waste of time.
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by FreeSEOTutorials.com
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