How I Potentially Lost Thousands Before the Iphone 5 Launch Because Of SEO Mistakes

A lot of people got hit around penguin, so why am I mad that I potentially lost thousands?

Because I had never 'bought' a link, spun an article (didn't do any article marketing, for that matter) or spammed any social media sites.

I was even apprehensive to link to sites that weren't relevant to my niche.

My site (an iphone wallet case site) was a little over a year when it took that hit. The only link-bait tactics I had engaged in were social profiles, manual blog commenting, a few directory listings and a lot of guest blogging. At the time, I was working at a very white-hat SEO firm, and so I was only using white hat techniques.

Now, granted, I wasn't rolling in a ton of traffic, (about 50-70 organic hits a day) but enough to make a pre-launch look really optimistic. I have another ecommerce site that gets similar numbers and similar price range of products and it does about 2k/mo in revenue. So nothing spectacular, but enough to get you excited for the iphone 5 to come out.

I was top 10 for 'iphone wallet case' and ranking number 1 for 'iphone 5 wallet case' - which was exactly what I was going after.

And then, on April 24, 2012 - the same time Penguin came down on websites - I checked my analytics and saw I had less than 6 hits at the end of the day.

To be honest, the penalty left me perplexed....a few days before the hit, my rankings dipped a little bit, but other than that, it came out of nowhere.

I did a lot of reading and researching, scraping the SEOMoz blogs among others for case studies and such about the Penguin update.

My 3 SEO Miskakes?

I narrowed it down to a few things that could have caused the penalty:

First, the landing page had only a few sentences of text and then a lead capture via Mailchimp to garner pre-launch email leads. There is talk that Google doesn't like those kinds of landing pages - they look too spammy.

If you saw my site you would see that it is so far from being spammy, but that doesn't matter if you are a google bot crawling through pages and interpreting code.

My second thought was a 'bad' link must have slipped in there somewhere through guest blogging. Guest blogging was my main source of links. But they were very quality, high-end links. I was posting on tech blogs, environmental blogs. I even scored a guest post spot with ReadWrite, formally ReadWriteWeb.

However, there were a few sites where I posted that seemed a little shady (I have no problem calling them out, here). I posted anyway because I was drawn to the PR 5 "PageRank" that would flow to my site, even though I know that PageRank is an overrated metric.

Was one of these links "bad" or "spammy" enough to warrant a penguin beating? I highly doubt it, but you have to make it an option, right?

Third of all, my frequent guest posting lead to many optimized anchor texts. And even though I took caution to not 'over-optimize' my keywords too much, in hindsight I probably didn't do it enough. Many of my anchor texts just said "iphone wallet case" and I would switch it up with different varying similar keyowrds, but they would be very similar. I did not have too many branded anchor texts.

My Conclusion

By now, you are probably thinking, 'duh, Jeremy. It was those darn anchor texts.' And I would say that you are right...but wait.

I read that those links can be fixed. So what did I do?

I emailed over 30 webmasters that I had guest blogged for, of course, and requested anchor text optimization changes. About 12 of them got back with me, cooperated, and turned my links to branded anchor texts. "Kangarew" or "kangarew llc".

You can see my OSE link portfolio now. My top two anchor texts are branded. My name (Jeremy Page) and the brand (Kangarew).

The Mystery Remains

I am well seasoned in SEO, but I obviously don't consider myself a 'guru' by any means. Like I said, I worked for a well-known SEO firm for 2 years, and have been doing online marketing for about 5 years now.

And I will admit, Google got me here.

I gotta hand it to them. They 'caught' me guest posting on other peoples blogs for a link back. [note: I was also mindful of rotating texts in my author bios, which I always did from the beginning]

Congratulations, you officially doomed a nice side venture that took months to build (I was building the cases in an iphone 4s prototype when the hit took place).

But it is now November 22, 2012, and my site still hasn't recovered. It is completely off the radar...and it continues to get a measly 3-6 hits a day.

So the Penguin mystery continues...

What happened, Danny?

What happened, Rand?

(Perhaps this post needs more details to get a straight answer)

Anyone want to guess what happened?