Why has my site’s Google rank dropped from 1st to 2nd ?

Hard to believe I’ve been blogging and answering your questions here at SmartCompany for two years now! I’m still loving it and hopefully helping you with your online sales strategy along the way. There’s always a mad rush on a Thursday afternoon to respond to your questions and write something interesting, but please keep them coming!

My friend Cam McSween contacted me this week with a question, “why has my search engine ranking position slipped one spot from number one to two?”

Normally my answer would be “don’t worry about it”, it might just be a little Google Algorithm change, but I have a vested interest in Cam’s website because I helped optimise it about four years ago as a ‘favour for a friend’.

Feeling a little miffed and embarrassed I did a quick ‘competitor check’ on the number one ranking site for one of the key phrases that Cam and I want him to rank well for; ‘window cleaning Melbourne’. No prizes for guessing what Cam does for a living.

The site which has jumped over Cam’s site is https://www.acornclean.com/ – so, trying to understand why they rank where they do, I started to do some digging.

The first step I took was a ‘back link check’ to find out who’s linking to Cam’s competitor; the easiest way to do this is to use Yahoo’s link checking tool. “link:www.competitor.com.au”

What you’ll see next is a list of the sites Yahoo has found that link to Cam’s competitor.

It’s always a good idea to analyse the links on these link partners to get a feel for the anchor text they’re using as well as the page content theme and page rank of those link partners.

Here’s where it gets interesting…

Of course there are dozens of back-link pages just like the one above.

The SEO company (which I won’t name) behind this fiasco has simply taken script from a Bible (of all things! Blasphemers!) and seeded it with optimised copy and created optimised anchor text links back to their client’s website.

Needless to say, they’ve just had a spam report lodged through Google. https://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

I guess what’s really dangerous about this black hat back-linking technique is the danger that the SEO client’s website could face a Google penalty. I even wonder if the site owners which have those sub-domains attached to them (linking to https://www.acornclean.com/) even know they exist?

They’re also filling up the internet with spammy pages designed to only make ‘sense’ to the search engine robot and offering no use to humans what-so-ever.

Plus, as you can see, it’s so easy for anyone to detect and expose what’s going on!

Whether Google does anything is another matter entirely. I’ve personally lodged dozens of spam reports, but have yet to see Google take any action!

Time will tell.

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Chris Thomas heads Reseo, a search engine optimisation company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.

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