Ryan Abood sells gift baskets online. His business has done very well thanks, at least in part, to his high ranking on Google’s search engine. GourmetGiftBaskets.com ranks in the top one or two for most of his industry’s keywords.
However, something happened a few years ago that changed his business forever.
In late 2008, everything was going well for Abood and his business until one day his site wasn’t showing up at all on Google. Out of nowhere, Google had removed the site from its listings. As Abood tried to figure out what was going on, he discovered that one of the companies he had hired to manage the site’s SEO had been buying links.
Lesson #1: Don’t Buy Links Google – and other search engines – will not be happy if they find out you’re paying someone for links. Their organic search results are intended to be organic, and paying for links is more akin to Digg.com’s new, unpopular business model – where the bigger companies automatically get more prominence.
Well, Abood admitted the mistake and apologized to Google (for which there’s actually an official form to fill out). This didn’t mean they’d automatically be re-ranked where they were before, so they had to expand their strategy. They began increasing their pay per click, maximized their affiliate programs, and – for the first time – implemented a social media presence utilizing Facebook, Twitter, etc. They also began closely watching and incoming links and removed them if they could be construed as paid.
Lesson #2: Expand Your Marketing Strategies According to Abood, Google penalizing their site cost them about $4 million. Now, any penalty is going to cost, but it’s likely it wouldn’t have burned so badly if they already had more variety in their marketing. Don’t wait until something bad happens to use the marketing resources available to you.
Since making those changes, Abood and his company have seen even more growth than before. Google’s penalty, which was the impetus to these changes, in the long run ended up doing more good than harm.
Lesson #3: Don’t Give Up Sometimes it feels like the best thing to do when a crisis like this is cut your losses and give up, but don’t confuse “best” with “easiest.” Push through and you’ll be better off for it.
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