As mentioned in a previous post I entered our company’s SEO contest at mattbrandenburg.com. I created a very simple page and on Friday afternoon I was number one in Google and beginning to make inroads on the other engines.
This morning however I was nowhere to be found.
My website is verified with webmastertools, which shows no warnings or errors. My domain shows up if you search for it with “Dave Hamel”, but if you search for “Yoshirolla Kilomantra Dave Hamel” nothing.
As far as I know I have done nothing blackhat or even grayhat. So far all I have done is:
- created a post on Digg
- blogged about it on my personal blog.
- used Stumbleupon to share my blog
- sent out a message on facebook.
So it goes to show that what a search engine giveth it can taketh away just as fast. I will keep posting about my progress. Hopefully I can figure it out.
I was going to get into this on the last blog posting response but I got sidetracked. Do not worry about the day to day on this. These new pages will be in flux for a while to come!
You get different results in google.com than you do google.ca, I have even seen different results within the same city of Calgary. Google has servers and server farms EVERYWHERE, and they take time to propagate. The engines are also trying to make heads or tails of all these pages that are new about this new hot topic. Some pages are getting picked up and some lost. It will take time to sort it all out.
Do not focus on the day to day, just instead spend your time focusing on a campaign, then execute on it. It would not surprise me if the results are still in flux at the end of the contest.
smells like the Google Sandbox effect?