Don’t Do It!

Well, not when you have a niche blog and a lot of your main content is under that subdirectory. I did that, and promptly I got slapped. At least I think it is slapped rather than deindexed as I can still find some of my pages in google, ironically at least one being a page from within another subdirectory I had renamed (so I can expect those to disappear shortly too).

I’m a bit annoyed by this, as I had managed to breach the top 10, and had just got into dmoz, which boosted me slightly higher in the top 10. I thought finally after the project yo-yoed up and down the rankings for about 3 months since starting the project, that the site was finally going to stay in the top 10.

And especially as the bounces were getting narrower and the last bounce was also from the bottom of the top ten. However, this was misguided, and the site was blasted into oblivion the next day!

However, at the same time, I am learning from my mistakes experiences, I am trying not to get frustrated and I am trying to remember that I have other projects to keep working on. Projects that may very well turn out to be far more profitable than the one currently slapped.

So it certainly seems like a good idea for a beginner to have several projects going if they are going to rely on SEO alone as if your site gets slapped, so does your income, as nobody will see you.

Therefore it is good to back your projects up with article marketing, blog commenting, emailing opt-in contacts and anything else you can do to gain traffic through third party sources.

Now most of my traffic is now coming through from my article marketing efforts. Which is better than nothing at all, albeit small fish.

You can also learn how to do PPC properly, so you gain more money than you spend.

So, now I’m just waiting to see how long before google, yahoo etc decides what to do with my site. Hopefully it’s back within weeks rather than *gulp* months.

So lesson learned, don’t mess with your subdirectory once the search engines have started indexing you unless you are prepared to lose rankings. The only question that remains right now is how long will the penalisation last! And will the site come back and ascend into the top 10 quickly, fail to get back into the top 10, or simply resume the yo-yo effect? Stay tuned!