Last month i blogged about how theleavingcert.com had been punished by google for failing to have proper meta tags and descriptions on all pages. Less than a month later, we’ve got our top spot back…
It all started because i was messing around with new features and somewhere along the line our SEO plugin stopped working without notice… most likely a conflict with another bit of code but i really didn’t care HOW it happened, i just wanted to get it fixed.
Losing ground to competition is not good no matter who you are or what area you’re in. Not only might you lose traffic or new readers because of the drop in rankings but more importantly you give competition a sniff of what it’s like at the top. They gain in confidence, start thinking “hey, i must add some new features or content now that i’m top of google, i’m going to be getting more visitors” and most likely that’ll strengthen their position and leave you playing catch up.
So from the moment i discovered we’d been relegated in google, i made it my mission to get back to the top of google asap. The acid test was a search for ‘leaving cert’. It’s the most searched for ‘leaving cert’ related term (not surprisingly). We’d been at no.1 spot for some time in google.ie and perhaps even google.com, i can’t remember. But last month, after my cock up, we slipped backed to about 7th.
Today, here’s how things stand;
As you can see, normal service has resumed, we’re back to no.1 and no.2 in google.com. Over the past month we’ve worked hard on the site and churned out plenty of articles which i know is the best way to get the attention of google and of course readers. Now that we’re back on top, we can take it easy and put our feet up until someone overtakes us. Or not 
Enda & myself (co-pilot on theleavingcert.com) will be sitting down this summer and putting together bulletproof plans for the site for the following school year (2010/2011). It will be the first year the site has gotten ‘proper’ attention so it should be pretty dangerous next year. Up until now i’ve worked on it in bursts and just kept it ticking over, but it’s slowly starting to become something i work on daily or almost daily.