SEO Horror Story #2
We started a craft content site in December 2008. Our editors create original content and work with craft designers and manufacturers to get similar projects. Our site is a ‘how-to’ site for crafters.
In early February, we had about 100 organic visitors per day to our site. And, by Valentine’s Day, we had about 200/day from organic, primarily Google. We were looking forward to a great St., Patrick’s Day and Easter.
Our editors are great bloggers, and engage other craft bloggers and social media like Twitter, Facebook, etc. In February, we hired an SEO consultant who was stressing we did not have enough incoming links. They advised us we needed links to our site and we hired them since our team was too small to get ‘thousand of links per month’ which they implied we needed.
The first thing I noticed was they submitted to may be 3000 directories. I looked at some and was upset. First, they used my name as a contact. Second, they all looked like garbage.
A few weeks after they began link building our organic traffic was down to 25 per day. They said it was a ‘sandbox’ issue and search engines like Google put you in after a short period. I read up, sounded reasonable.
I then saw some of the links they were placing on other forums and sites: “Hey Man, check out the cool crochet patterns”. Our editors don’t talk that way. Our audience is 98% female; they would not talk that way. The same day I was digging in, a crochet forum brought to our attention that we were spamming their forum. We looked at the posts in question and we didn’t write any of them. It then dawned on me, our SEO consultant was writing these.
The firm we selected may not be a bad firm. I will reserve judgment. They subcontracted out the link building to an overseas firm. The SEO firm accepted full responsibility, and helped us clean up and delete the bad links in an attempt to repair the damage. We immediately terminated them of course. After a few months of clean-up on our part, we wrote to Google via Webmaster Tools, explained what happened and started seeing traffic again shortly thereafter. Slowly but surely. Took 6 – 9 months to recover I think…
Now, only our full-time editors do what they do best. Create unique content. Engage bloggers. And build quality links slowly. Seems to be working!
