Flushing Your SEO Results Down the Can!

Recently I had worked on a site optimising it for SEO.
After working on optimising their website for selected keyword phrase rankings, I had acheived some great results with their site ranking quite high in Google, Yahoo & MSN both Australia and US datacenters in a number of cases, ranking in the top 5 results.

Admittedly I was somewhat surprised to see how quickly this relatively new site could rise to the top 10 of the selected keyword phrases. I modified some onsite content, worked on creating some back links but didn’t do a lot in this area due to the client budget, and focused on getting alot of their pages out of Google’s supplemental results.
Then it happened… I complete my monthly report for clients web site rankings and to my surprise the site had lost the majority of search term rankings except for their domain name related keywords as it closely related to their business.

So I do a bit of investigation only to find that all the good work I had done on the site had dissappeared. I start comparing my last site changes to the live versions and sure enough all my onsite changes had dissappeared. It just happened that the web site owner had his web developer make some changes to the site and overwrote any SEO work done on the site which had big implications in their sites rankings.

I advised the client that the SEO work had been undone and needed to be done again unfortunately at extra cost as I now had to create a combined version of SEO and developer changes to their site.

If you have multiple teams accessing your site at various times you should either move to a version control system or advise all parties of any website upgrades to ensure that you maintain the latest versions of the site. If your going to spend your businesses hard earned dollars on optimisation, make sure it sticks.
I have a few thoughts about the web developer who made the changes but that’s another story….