Maternity Swimwear – back where we belong, #1

Posted on July 24, 2009 by Paul · Posted in Google, Track our Progress, Website Design, Website Updates

Checked Google this morning and Maternity Swimwear is back at number 1 for the non-exact global search term maternity swimwear. Phew. We are well chuffed as it was a bit of a shock to come in yesterday and find it had dropped from the face of the earth, or should I say Google earth.

So what happened. Ok I’ll admit it, it was me! Me and my fat fingers, or fat mouse clicks. Well not all me. I’ll explain. I was updating our database on Wednesday and instead of emptying our product table to re-import the changes I had made, I dropped the table. This was quickly rectified by myself and Gary and we quickly had the database back up and running, probably within 5-10 minutes. However due to a plugin that we installed, wp-cache, the site was cached and wouldn’t update even though we were running SQL queries so we knew the database was fine. This wp-cache meant the site wasn’t updated for a good while and during this time it appears Google crawled the site, received the cached SQL and PHP errors and added entries into our robots.txt file. This then meant Google thought the site was invalid and dropped it.

What did we do to rectify it. Well we searched for reasons why a site can be dropped. We had heard of this before, duplicate content, bad code can be some of the reasons so we did a quick check, no problems there. So we used Google webtools. We then found out the robots.txt had changed and a lot of Disallow entries had been added by Google. So we removed the invalid entries and increased the rate at which google crawls the site in the hope we get back up there. Then this morning we have checked and there we are, number 1 in Google again. We are chuffed as we have worked really hard to get this site to number 1 in the first place so it was a bit of a shock to not find it up there yesterday. However we have learnt from this. Onwards and upwards.

We have said this many times before but this is all a learning curve. In hindsight maybe it was good for us to experience this as it improves our skills in this business. We had to diagnose what had happened and put in place corrective steps to get it back. It only took our site down for 1 day. Not bad if you have many sites, but when you are starting and only have a few niches it can make you panic. Ok it can make me panic but then I am a worrier. Good job Gary is the calm collective one. I just run around screaming.