This Feels Great

This time three months ago I was getting 3,000 visitors a week to my successful business site. It is a service that attracts clients from all over the world. My schedule was full and I was looking at ways to expand.

Then at the end of April I logged into Google Analytics and couldn't believe it. Instead of my average of 500 hits on a Monday, I saw that only 32 had visited - I found out what a Google slap was like!

Luckily the services I offer are in demand and I get a lot of recommendations, so my schedule is still full. But the hits haven't come back. There was obviously something wrong with my site.

All about rankings

I have always loved stats and I started to get a little obsessed with my rankings. I would check them at least three times a day and was desperate to improve them.

I started my SEO by writing articles and soon learned that this worked (2009). Then I got SEO SpyGlass and looked at what others were doing to rank number one: Forum signatures, profile links, link wheels, blog networks etc. Even the lovable Pat Flynn was spinning and blasting spammy articles everywhere (and being very open about it).

1. I first started with forum links (after seeing one website rank for a very competitive keyword only using forums). My rankings shot up.

2. Then I started using link wheels. I read that it was important not to spin content, so I wrote a different version of the article for each blog post. I was a fast typer but it still took a lot of time.

3. I then bookmarked the different links and pinged them all.

4. In Feb/March I read a case study about BMR. I tried it out with a secondary site I had and it worked great. So I then used it for my business. My rankings increased again.

5. My on page optimization was focused on the keywords. Seriously focused on keywords.

Since the Slap

I let it sit for a couple of months to see if the rankings would come back. I made a few changes and posted blogs as normal, but wanted to wait a little while. BMR was de-indexed around the time of the slap, so all of those posts were deleted.

Yesterday I spent 6 hours going through all of the links that I created. Wow, what a reality check; I had wasted all that time to get an artificial boost in popularity, a boost that wasn't based on anything but just from the power of backlinks that nobody will ever see.

It felt great deleting all of those links. Luckily I had kept a record of every link I created, making this process easier. The content that I had written was actually quite informative and well-written, but it was a waste just sitting there with no one to look at it.

I also had a look at pages on my business site and realized that although what I had written was good and informative, it was over-optimized, and in some cases looked silly. So I changed the headings, descriptions, and made it more readable and more fun.

Lessons Learned

I am now focused on creating the best content, spending my time writing new material for my website instead of wasting time creating backlinks. I am also going to spend that time looking at other ways to bring traffic to my website.

Rankings aren't important to me anymore. It feels great to now that I'm going to focus on making my website for the user instead of the engine.