A few days ago, we realised theleavingcert.com was no longer no.1 for key terms which we had previously dominated for months on end. Not only were we knocked off top spot, but we were down in 4th /5th /6th spots for key terms like ‘leaving cert’.
I was surprised to say the least because we had been working harder than ever on the site, plus i had made several changes and improvements on the SEO side of things back in January. After looking around the site i found out the All in One SEO plugin, although activated & configured properly (and displaying no errors) wasn’t outputting meta information properly.
In fact, it was outputting nothing at all which meant the site’s default meta information was being displayed. That meant descriptions, titles and keywords were all empty, leaving google’s robots confused. So we were punished with a drop in our position in google, but it’s a good job we noticed quickly, otherwise things could have been a lot worse.
So our competition may have been cracking open champagne at our apparent collapse in google, but i can confirm the drop will only be temporary – the no.1 spot will be returned to it’s rightful owners shortly 😉
It’s interesting how little changes can have a massive effect… if we were a business, competing for lucrative keywords, we’d no doubt see a drop in revenue and my head would be on the chopping block because of it 🙂 If not quite sure what happened but i suspect there was a conflict somewhere along the line as i’ve been making plenty of changes recently.
With this site, at worst we lose a bit of traffic and pride but i take things like this seriously… it’s important that we not only recover but come back stronger.. i know myself it’s really disheartening when you’re working hard on a site yet can’t dislodge competition from Google results. That’s when most people will give up and accept they must join the queue. So i’m eager to make it as bloody a battle as possible if competitors are trying to overtake us 
You could quickly setup some alerts from the “Intelligence” in Google Analytics, I'm pretty sure you could set a regular expression for natural search, and when it drops below a certain threshold – auto email you?
good idea! i know you can create alerts based on ad positions (for adwords campaigns)… not sure about regular search positions although i'm sure there's a work around…
I really need to make sure I have all my All In One Seo settings set up on my blog!
Hey Sean really like what you're doing to the blog with the pictures an all! Adds more to the site… looking forward to the new release blog. Fair play on the pictures though you can see you have really improved creating images compared to a few months ago! What's your secret?
Cheers Jonny, yeah i'm trying to beef up my photoshop skills over time 🙂
Secret is just to get in to the habit of creating something every day!
i hope to complete a degree in IT management in 2009.
A few days ago, we realised theleavingcert.com was no longer for key terms which we had previously dominated for months on end.