This was one of our more challenging projects. Not just a case of a client struggling with rankings, they were actually BANNED by Google. The previous team managing search engine rankings for this client had played almost every dodgy internet marketing trick possible, including.

1. Hiding content on the pages. 
2. Taking part in an Indian 3 way link exchange deal, eg. Site a links to site B, Site B links to site C. 
3. Massive amounts of duplicate content, many pages with essentially the same data. 

It had worked for them for a while, in fact they had got all the way to No.13 on Google.com.au for their target phrase “Baby Names”

Then things turned pear shaped.

www.mybaby.net.au dropped to 39 for “baby names” on Google.com.au. 31-40 is a dreaded position to be on Google. Your site might deservedly be ranked at this level, but you might also have what is known as the “+30 Google Penalty”. In this case, Google makes a determination that there is someone not quite honest about your site’s popularity, and applies a penalty where your rankings are reduced by 30 places. Google knows that page 4(31-40 on Google) is as good as a death sentence for the site, as almost no one ever bothers to go that far down its search results.

Two months later, and all pages were removed from Google, and all rankings disappeared, the dreaded total removal by Google.

5 months after the penalty had been applied, the SEO Guys were called in. We dug through the site’s html and found piles of bad code, hidden text and links. We found sites referring to the banned links campaign that the site had taken part in.

We went to work and fixed everything thing we could see, then contacted Google to let them know all issues were fixed, and could they please reassess the site. No change for 30 days, but on day 31, the 24th of March 2009, the home page appeared back in Google, then a few weeks later, a few more pages appeared.

As of writing this case study on the 8th of April 2009, the site is at No.8 for “Baby Names” on www.google.com.au and doing well on many other phrases.

A tremendous result, that is far from over yet and we expect the site to at some point, gain rankings on google.com as well, and get many more pages indexed.

Stop PRESS!!!

As of today, the 3rd of May 2009, www.mybaby.net.au as gate crashed google.com, and as well as ranking in the top 10 on google.com.au, it is now ranking at 18 on www.google.com. An impressive result, since the site is an Australian site, for it to be ranking so well internationally.

We expect it to improve further yet.

3 September 2009: 
As of today, site is at 15 on Google.com for Baby Names. Its pretty hard with .com.au to do well on Google.com, but we are happy with this recent climb. I think we can improve further yet.