Have you ever wondered how long it will take you to make it to the number one spot for your most coveted search term in Google? More importantly when you get there, have you ever wondered how long it will take you to climb back to the first page of search for your desired keyword much less your esteemed position at the number one spot. It happened to me and I am about to tell you a tale that is so resent, I am still recovering from the aftermath effects.
When I build a site, my ultimate goal is that one day it ranks on the first page for one or two search terms I choose from the beginning. If the domain name makes up this search term, then I can not accept anything short of the top 3 spot as satisfactory.
My company owns OverseasContract(dot)Com and prior to August 26th 2009, we enjoyed the #1 spot in Google for the search term “Overseas Contract” (without quotes) and most recently for “overseas contract jobs” (also without quotes). On the faithful aforementioned day, the site was hacked and in order to protect more damage and intrusion, my host shot the site down and told me that I could open it back anytime I am ready to fix the problem. The second half of the problem was that this was the second time this was happening so this time I really needed to fix it, but this meant my site will be offline for the duration of the quest for the fix.
Within 5 days of the site being offline, it dropped like and anchor in the Atlantic Ocean from the number one spot to oblivion. I checked the first 10 pages and it was no where to be found and every day I continued to check while my programmers and I worked on a lasting solution to the hackers who had attacked the site with malware. Losing our number one spot was very devastating and I did not know what to think. I began to notice some activity at the .org which I also own put is parked.
On Sept 9th 2009, we were back online again, fully fortified with all the defense mechanism possible and a few offensives which whimsically redirected some suspect IP addresses to hell.com (yes I did it, we might as well get a laugh out of it).
Every day since then, I kept checking on Google and I am proud to announce that as of yesterday the 14th of Sep., we are back to the number one spot for “Overseas Contract” and currently at number two for “overseas contract jobs”. We were beaten out of the number one spot by OverseasContractjobs(dot)net but for “overseas contract job” we beat them to the # one spot
I am yet to draw any inference from all this happenings as I am still assimilating the data. I however felt like sharing it while the news is still hot and verifiable.
There will continue to be a long interval between my posts on this blog. I have mentioned in an earlier post that I am currently back to school so I can only squeeze out time to post once in a while.
@Frankie
Thanks for your sharing your story. Another google myth debunked! This is common behavior from google. They understand that sites go down for one reason or another and don’t penalize you for it. If the content was ranked in the top 10 once, it makes sense that once google sees it again, it will rank again, too.
We took a site offline for 60 days one time to test this out. The site was about 2000 pages of content. We had 100’s of top 10 rankings. Our rank came back in about 2 weeks but the 2000 pages were no longer indexed. But we submitted a sitemap.xml and got all the pages indexed again.
- Richard.
Thanks! This is very useful information for every seo person/website developer.
-Anil
Great Article!
PeopleSearches.com
How come you don’t use beyond dot com?
Is indeed better?
Indeed suited my particular application. I am yet to try beyond but I may some day