I was in my accountant's office the other day and as we were wrapping up our meeting, he started asking questions about SEO. Apparently his site had suddenly dropped into oblivion for no apparent reason. After further investigation, I quickly found that there were about 2000 keywords hidden at the bottom of each page and that he had 5-6 domains all mirroring the same content. Over the next week we were able to get the spam cleaned up and submitted a reconsideration request to Google. In less than a week, he back up in the top three for his core keywords.

I don't think that this is a rare situation for small business owners as it there is a lot of information flowing around in forums and from eager web designers looking for quick and easy ways to confirm that "Yes, they do build optimized websites". Now in this case, my accountant had read a couple of forums and this seemed like a fine idea; Search engines look for keywords, so if there are keywords at the bottom of my page, it should help my search rankings.

I think that very often it is not understanding the big picture of SEO that can be a problem. No one technique or approach to SEO will yield long-term consistent results. When your SEO strategy is based on one single technique, you leave yourself vulnerable, at best to constant fluctuations, and at worst to penalties and even blacklisting.

When planning your SEO strategy, understand all factors that search engines look at and address many of them. Like a financial portfolio, this will hedge against short term fluctuations and will yield strong, consistent results over the long term.

Labels: reconsideration request, search engine optimization, SEO