Google: a tale of unrequited love
For a brief two weeks in July we got great coverage on Google and then we got removed form the search results again, in favour of low-traffic, irrelevant sites.
My first theory was that it was due to the duplicate content problems that we had (which I fixed by removing it through the webmaster panel and using a robots.txt). Then I thought it might be due to linking to dubious content from our forums (which I fixed by modding phpBB to add a rel=”nofollow”).
It’s now clear that it’s none of these issues so I’ve re-done the homepage by essentially reverting some of my SEO changes.
I guess in the couple of weeks we’ll find out if that was the issue or if it was something else.
In the meantime, yesterday we had the highest ever traffic day with more than 1 million hits and enough page views to ensure that we’d get kicked off the free Google Analytics if it continues at even close to that level for the month. I’m continuing the off-line marketing campaign plus there’s accelerating word-of-mouth online; just today somebody emailed saying that they’d recommended the site to 40 people.
So I am still pretty comfortable that we will continue our exponential traffic rise even without any coverage from Google. But it would be nice to see Fab Swingers come ahead of some of the absolute crap that is presently beating it.