In the past week an Arizona personal injury website has gone MIA from the Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page). The site, which I will call “SiteX“, had achieved amazing search engine ranking in a relatively short period of time. SiteX was on the first page of Google for a number of competitive keyword phrases and even had top position for the following; (“Phoenix personal Injury Attorney”, “Arizona Accident Lawyer” “Phoenix Car Accident Attorney”, etc…) The stunning early success contradicted what I had always preached to my clients – “patience”- that it takes time for a site to properly build trust and link authority, particularly with Google. In fact, SiteX was so successful that two of my clients, frustrated with the early lack of ranking progress, left me and went with the company who built and optimized SiteX.

So what happened to SiteX? A sudden and precipitous drop in google ranking is usually the result of a Google penalty – brought on by a violation of Google’s webmaster’s guidelines. I suspect that that the main reason for the penalty was an overly aggressive and spammy approach to link building. After just a few months, SiteX had over a thousand of inbound links. At one point Yahoo SiteExplorer counted over 6,000 inbound links. While some of these links were legitimate (legal directories, online business profiles, pages from website, etc..) many were not. Using site explorer I found BLOGs on various unrelated topics (Sports, Fashion, Finance) that were linking to SiteX. The BLOG postings were all stories copied directly from AP news stories. Each posting ended with a contextual link to SiteX with the words “Phoenix Personal Injury Lawyer” or some close variation. Each day multiple links were added in this way. This was clearly a scheme aimed at increasing the ranking of SiteX – a direct violation of the guidelines. Unfortunately for SiteX, Google employs a league of PHDs who tweak the algorithm so that it can detect this type of blatant abuse.

Building relevant inbound links to your site is an important part of ethical search engine optimization. If you have a great site with informative content, people will begin to link to your site “naturally”. For example, in the above paragraph I linked to Google’s webmaster guidelines. I certainly did not link to the article because I was trying to boost the Google rank of that page. Rather, I did so because I felt my readers would benefit from the information. This is an example of a natural link and the kind that Google values most. SiteX on the other hand built a huge amount of non-relevant and “unnatural” backlinks over a short period of time and it now appears it to have paid a huge price.

Another contributing factor may be “Over-Optimization” (link to a great video on the subject). In SEO there is such a thing as over doing it. “Over Optimization” happens when your website is considered “too good” by Google – either in terms of a sudden spike in the number of backlinks, or because of excessive on-page optimization, your website will be automatically restricted or penalized. So how does Google decide whether a site is over optimized? Since Google is completely automated, it relies on its algorithm to figure this out. Besides indexing a certain website, it also compares the website to its competitors. This may have also contributed to the disappearance of SiteX.

Even though the designer of SiteX is a competitor of mine, I take no joy in reporting this development.  I know more than anyone, the hard work that goes into building an optimized website and I feel sorry for the personal injury attorney faced with the prospect of starting over.  I do hope, though, that this story serves as a reminder that Internet “dominance” is not an attainable goal.  You can’t out wit or beat Google.  At the end of the end of the day, Google is interested in only one thing: Creating the best user experience possible for their searchers.  Therefore, its imperative that you adhere to their webmaster guidelines, craft unique custom content and  above all…be patient.