The Easiest Way To Screw Up Your Ranking on Google
For every internet marketer or affiliate out there, if you do not believe in organic results for the offers you promote, you may be missing out on a lot of free prospects to your offer pages/landing pages.
I have been doing PPC for a while now and for some of the offers I promote, I do build landing pages and register a dedicated domain for them. One day, I thought to myself, why not just turn these landing pages of mine into pages that would pop up on search results. This thinking made me do some SEO magic that turned out to be beneficial at first, but went gaga some weeks later. Read on to see me mistake.
Whenever I perform searches relating to some offers I promote on the internet, I find out that many of the first page result are promoting what I’m paying(PPC) for. In my mind, I was like, if they could do it, then I probably can try to do it. Maybe, not beat them, but at least get some decent traffic from organic results.
So, I decided to spruce up my landing pages with some SEO magic. Within days, I was appearing on the first page of Google for my keywords, but not too much traffic since I was ranked around 10th on the first page.
As days passed by, my ranking for my chosen keywords and phrases jumped to number 3 position behind the company whose offers I’m running. Seeing this made me happy and I felt like an SEO guru.
I maintained this position and I started making some organic sales through my SERP rankings. About 2-3 weeks later, I performed my normal keyword search to see where I rank, but to my surprise, I saw my rankings go down to position number 5. How did this happen? Well, a new site that’s about some days old took the position number for my main keywords and key phrases.
I didn’t feel comfortable seeing this since it was my position 
. I do understand this happens and I understand relevancy matters, but my content and everything was more than relevant. This new website happen to be in a blog form. So understand here that sites that come in the way of blogs get good rankings and better crawl rate than ordinary sites.
After all of this happened, I had one goal; TAKE BACK MY POSITION. I SEO tweaked my site in a way SEO experts wouldn’t advise. I introduced the h1 tags on my site to see if I can reclaim my position since I was not having any h1 tag in it before. So, I put up about 3 h1 tags on a single page, and my page was crawled by Google the next day. About 3 days later, I found I was not appearing for my keywords and phrases any more. I mean I was not even appearing up to 1000th for my keywords and key phrases. I was only showing on the result pages for my domain. Weird!
I later on researched on “overuse of h1 tags” and found out it is mostly considered spamming and manipulating the search engines when you have more than 1 h1 tag on a single page. You may have as much as of the other h tags as you want, but not the h1 tag. I learned my lessons immediately and reversed the changes I made earlier.
In a nut shell, I went from being ranked 5th on Google to being nowhere on Google. This is a lesson to anyone out there who wants to do some SEO magic. Before starting to spruce your site with some “SEO magic,” make sure you research into whatever SEO technique/element you wish to implement before the actual implementation.
I have since removed all the excess h1 tags and I am in the process of reclaiming my position. I am currently on the third pages for my keywords and phrases. My hope is that I get back to my original position.
JD
Comments
Leave a Reply
