Possibly the toughest one we have taken on to date, but we do love a challenge.

Life Insurance

Mid June, 2009
The client contacted us from Canada, after his site which had been performing poorly for its main phrase(Life Insurance Canada) suddenly dropped totally out of Google.ca.  After discussing with him what had happened immediately prior to the drop, it was clear to us that Google had lost faith in his site/  A loss of trust from Google, is a major problem because before your site can hope to rise in rankings, this trust has to be won back.

We set about overhauling the site, to first win Google's trust back.  The first things we found.

1. The web developer had been using rel=nofollow on internal links to try and hoard page rank.  Google says please don't do this.  We fixed it.
2. The site was a big jumble of html and xhtml causing search engines to have problems crawling the site.  Fixed.
3. There were many duplicates of every page, caused by a problem in naming new pages.  Fixed.
4. There were numerous other html, navigation and content issues which we fixed.
5. We optimised the site, but did so REASONABLY.  Repeating the main phrase 15 times in 4 paragraphs is not reasonable.
6. The site had a blog, that had been spammed with rubbish.  Its no relevant to have comments turned on for this blog, so comments deleted and turned off.

Anyway 3 weeks after we started and BAAMM! Back into Google.ca above its previous rankings which had been lost 6 weeks before.  Up from not in the top 100 pages, to pages 2-5 for the main phrases.

Lots of work to do yet, but we are on the way

Update 29 July 2009.
Site now at No.4 on www.google.ca for life insurance Canada, and no 17 for "Life Insurance"  This is a massive result, to go from totally out of Google, not even in the top 1000, to page 1 for one of the main terms, and Page 2 with another.

We will continue to work on this site for some months to come, we are confidant that a top 2 position for these two search terms is achievable.

Update 30 August 2009
Sometimes things happen, that just make you shake your head.  Almost at our target rankings, and the previous head of SEO for this business, decided to give us some help…. by loading 15 or so blogs on the same server as the main site, all with poor and duplicate content, all linking to www.insuranceshoppers.ca.  Google has seen this as an attempt to scam higher rankings and removed all recent gains.  Its heartbreaking to see this hard work go down the drain.  Nothing for us to do now, but to pick ourselves up and continue.  We get paid when we get results, so no point in worrying about what has happened, we can only move forward.  The "helper" has taken the blogs down, and we have advised Google what has happened and are hopeful Google will see it as an error outside of our control.

But something we have learned….. we now instruct our clients and their web developers to NOT try and help us.  Everything we do, is totally by Google's book.  Tricks might work in the short term, but we are yet to see a site pulling such stunts, that did not eventually get caught.

Update 15 September 2009
Site penalty is removed by Google, though full rankings have not been restored.  We are behind the game but still in the race, which is great.

Update 18 december 2009
Site now at 25 for "Life Insurance" on Google.ca which is great! We are expecting to hit our target of top10 early in 2010, assuming no more "help" is provided.

Update 20 May 2010
Site now at 15 – bouncing up as high as 12 some days.