Adrac Ltd recently delivered a presentation to City financiers about search penalties and how the internet can affect investments, both in positive and negative ways.  It revealed to investors how integral natural search is with all areas of commercial success.

One of the examples that my colleague used was that of property portal NetMovers. It had found consistent high rankings  on page one for all its keywords – apart from one period in 2008, when www.netmovers.net mysteriously disappeared from Google’s search index.

People could still visit the website by typing the name directly into their browser bar, but it was not visible on search engine results pages.

 

Google review of NetMovers

NetMovers had been penalised – banned from Google’s search engine results pages – without warning, notification or explanation, which is pretty standard.  According to NetMovers’ staff, the effects of the penalty were severe – web traffic fell sharply and the office phones fell silent.

Adrac’s analysis of the ban revealed it had been levied following a successful (and white hat) link building campaign – the natural search team concluded that Google’s automated system had reviewed NetMovers and interpreted the campaign’s triumph as black hat.

Nevertheless, over the next three months, Adrac’s account managers, designers and copywriters worked to ensure the website was strong, compliant and efficient.

When the ban was finally removed, www.netmovers.net returned but its ranking had suffered: users could access the portal from search engine results, but its natural search performance that our experts had built over time had dwindled.

 

NetMovers review branding

NetMovers decided at this point that, from a branding perspective, it wanted to change its domain and it seemed like a timely opportunity to do so. It became www.netmovers.co.uk.

 

Lessons learned

Over months, NetMovers recovered its previous ranking and analysis was undertaken by us and them to assess what had been learned, what could have been done better, and what the implications were for the future.

The NetMovers case reveals how even compliant websites can be affected by a ban. It also demonstrates the value of experience – nobody panicked! The situation gave Adrac the opportunity to audit NetMovers website to make sure it was spot-on which, on the whole, it was.

A skilled internet marketing agency will audit all aspects of marketing activity on an ongoing basis and keep up to date with Google’s guidelines, and there is obviously much less risk by using an agency with time-served professionals who avoid black hat activity.

 

Embedded links

Webmaster guidelines http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

One man’s penalty nightmare http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=712234c0315afff0&hl=en

Adrac’s website health check http://www.adrac.co.uk/

Quality score http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=10215