Oogle-Boogle, Frugal Google...

You gotta love Google! Why? Here's why...

I've had a web site since the late 90's. I never really did anything with it. It mostly just sat there.

A little background: I created one of the most popular (and earliest) viral videos in history and that was about all that was on my site. I never traded links. I never promoted the site. I never optimized it. Nothing. It just sat there and continually drew in hundreds or thousands of visitors a day (mostly to watch the viral video).

This year, I thought: Hmmm, I should really do something with all this traffic. Give my visitors something else to do other than just watch an old viral video.

So, I registered here and started learning about SEO and everything else.

Here's how bad my site was:

1. I'm a writer - and the best piece of writing advice I've ever gotten in my life was to avoid repetition at all costs. But, as you know, keyword density (repetition) is one of the most important aspects of SEO. So, my site had virtually no keywords that were repeated more than once on a given page.

2. I'm also a very concise writer. I like it short and sweet (this post notwithstanding). So, there was very little text on my site (and, like I said, none of it was repeated). So, I thought: If I don't have my important keywords in the text - I'll put 'em in the meta tags! So, I keyword spammed all the meta tags on my site. And, I treated the site as a whole, instead of as a group of separate pages - so I added every keyword I could think of that had anything to do with any of the pages on my site - to all the pages on my site (so most pages had meta-keywords that had nothing to do with the content on that page).

3. My domain name has no keywords (related to my site) in it. And, when I created the site, I used directory names that had no keywords in them either - to keep them short (remember, I liked things short and sweet).

4. I never updated the site, so there were broken links.

5. I didn't use meta-descriptions.

6. As I mentioned above, I did no link-building, or promotion, or marketing whatsoever.

7. I never used redirects (and I liked moving pages around).

8. I never submitted to directories or search engines.

9. I almost never posted a link to my site anywhere (signatures, etc...).

10. I never wrote a single article.

So, basically, I had the most poorly optimized site on Earth (by far). But, I still had a PR3 and more than a thousand unique visitors a day (not bad for a low-quality 8 year old viral video eh).

After learning all I could here, I completely re-designed my site (I'm no html wiz) and I fixed all the above problems. I added pages and pages of new (100% original) content.

I made sure that I only used white-hat techniques (and stayed far away from grey-hat and black-hat).

So, what happens???

My backlinks go from practically nil to thousands (gradually, over the course of a few months). Everything looks great. And...

I get punished by Google! Big time! My best guess was that it was the link-builder I hired (he added a bunch of links to link-farm-type sites - yet I removed them all within a week once I saw what he was doing).

A few weeks later, my traffic starts to fluctuate and go back up. And, then I get punished again! Who knows what for this time (I think it was a few links to domains I had parked at Sedo or NameDrive).

And, now my PR actually drops! And, my traffic is cut in half (again)!

You gotta love Google for punishing the sites it purports to support. How on earth could SEO'ing my site get FAR WORSE results than what I described above??? I heard someone mention recently that there's going to be a big market for REMOVING SEO from web sites soon.

But, luckily, the story has a happy ending...

With the Google update today, my PR seems to have doubled! Yay! And, about frickin' time Google!

I'm sure I'm not the only one Google's been screwing with... So, take heart (and be patient), and perhaps everything will correct itself - eventually... Perhaps...

Ciao - Until the next time the big G screws us all again...

 

next time use bold word for titles and italitics for quotes, then more could be able to scan through this long exaustive but possibly interesting post

 

so ill be the first one. what viral video is it.

 

OK then... It was 'The Dildo Song'... $xxx budget - xxx,xxx,xxx viewers after 8 years...

And the scary (and annoying part)... If I had shot it today (instead of 8 years ago) and it was just as popular as it was at the time - the cast and crew (and myself) would have split more than a million dollars! But, unfortunately, there's never been a way of monetizing viral videos until just recently (unless you were a massive site with millions of videos).


Oops, forgot to add a link: TheDildoSong.com

Although, I'll warn you - while (technically) there's nothing obscene about the video (there's only a single swear word and no nudity) it is most definitely NOT WORK SAFE!!! And, it's not for children either (you could probably have guessed that by the title)! It was just a video a friend and I did for fun one weekend. It was never meant to be seen by the general population, but you know word-of-mouth...

 

TAKE HOME message, never redesign a old site, am I right?

 

Just realized...

This should serve as a kind of case study in word-of-mouth and viral marketing - to show people the true power of the internet slash viral-marketing slash word-of-mouth, etc...

When I did the Dildo Song - a year later, for fun, I posted it online (and as I mentioned above I did no promotion or marketing). I posted it mostly because I simply wanted a digital version of the video (and back then, it was expensive to make a QuickTime). After I put it online, I sent one single email about it to a mailing list I was a member of. That was it! The sum-total of all marketing I did was to send one email to a mailing list of a few hundred vintage movie poster collectors I was a member of. One email and nothing more.

That single email led to a massive viral run that ended with the video being one of the top 3 most downloaded videos of all time - within like 4 months or so!

And, that one email (and of course the video itself) has brought in between 500 and 10,000 visitors a day to my web site - for the better part of a decade now! And, read above for how well my web site was optimized for most of that time... And, that's just the visitors to my site - try a Google search for "dildo song" to see just how many sites claim it as their own (some with permission to show it, most without). I think I only come up #3...

How else could you reach a hundred million viewers (sorry, advertising-comsumers) for like a couple hundred bucks? It's just staggering when you really think about it... One solitary email note - turned into a hundred million pairs of eyes!

That's why all these big firms are spending fortunes trying to (typically poorly) recreate these cheap viral phenomenons.

 

That or Google has really ramped up punishing sites recently (for even tiny infractions away from the 'ideal' that Google is trying to unilaterally impose on everyone)...

 

I guess you should of left good enough alone or did the link building your self or by someone who is responsible for completing the job properly. Good luck