…and The Google taketh away.
All of our companies at Founders Co-op rely on organic search traffic to drive revenue and margin (some more so than others), and we’re very careful to stay well on the “white hat” side of SEO best practices to ensure that our hard-fought gains on that front are lasting.
But inevitably we get caught up in Google’s filtering mechanisms from time to time (often because a white label distribution strategy has triggered a duplicate content flag on their end) and have to go through the “site reconsideration” process to clear things up. The process feels fair and we’ve never failed to be reinstated, but the experience is always a stark reminder of the power Google holds over our business success.
This happened again this morning with one of our companies – a site that had been receiving thousands of Google organics a day was suddenly capped at 500 visits, and then received a metered trickle of traffic each hour after the cap was hit. We quickly reviewed all our recent actions to make sure we hadn’t screwed anything up, fired off a reconsideration petition, and are now waiting for the wheels of justice to turn. I fully expect that we’ll be back to normal in a few days, but I’m freshly in awe of Google’s dominance in web content distribution.