SEO is one of the best and cheapest ways of getting great targetted traffic. Everybody knows this and tells you this. What people don't tell you is that it has become more and more difficult over time rank in search engines and nowadays SEO is the best way to enjoy head aches and sleepless nights. Here is my story with Google, here is how I lost everything and got it back in less than a month. Late 2006: who cares about Google? This is when it all began for my latest baby. As an experienced SEOptimizer, I know there is almost no chance that your website ranks well on google with a freshly registered domain (not enough trust). Accordingly, I didn't really care what google could think of me at that time because I had more important things to do ranging from building the website down to finding the keywords I would target later. That's exactly what I did for more than 2 months. Early 2007: Nothing to be mentionned yet After months of hard work building the basics I did what I call preparatory SEO i.e. 1 or 2 forum posts with some links and 2 or 3 directory submissions. At this time, Google had indexed all my pages and even more than I wanted thanks to that CMS I used to love that created duplicate content... Anyway I left things as they were: no visitors on that websites and many others waiting for me to update the content and do some maintainance SEO. That's what I did lol June 2007: What's wrong with you man? By May I was beginning to worry about my website receiving no visits from Google. OK, I hadn't done any SEO, was in a competitive market... but as you know any website with ten pages indexed in google will at least receive one or two visits a months...but no not mine! So I opened my browser (Firefox, my "angry" browser) and began studying the issue with all those nice plug-ins it offers. After one or two sleepless nights I came to the conclusion that google was unconfortable with my pages' coding and stuff, in clear it couldn't read my pages (got that from google's webmaster tools - very usefull!) The fact is, I wasn't confortable with that CMS too and it made me more and more angry day after day! So I decided that I was a (angry) "full control" person and that I needed a more personal tool. I dropped the CMS and got my own stuff installed. THE BIGGEST MISTAKE YOU CAN MAKE: GETTING ANGRY!!! Yes dear reader, I was so angry that I took all the above decisions in a few days and deleted the old version with no 301 .htaccess redirects!!! July 9th 2007: An unforgettable day! While I was rebuilding my website, I thought it was time to do some agressive SEO (the kind you do when lauching a website). That was a good decision, because: - my domain was old enough - I had pages indexed in google - I had some inbound links already ... After one week of hard work trading links, submitting to directories, optimizing pages... I GOT MY RANKINGS. YESSS, in no time I was on the second page for my competitive targetted keywords on google!!! That was great I was happy as it was ment to continue given the fact that google hadn't discovered all the links yet... A few days later, it is google who was about to get really angry and I didn't know he was as touchy as me! At this point let's have a summary of the situation: 1- An old website: 100% indexed with low trust domain at least a duplicate url for every page 2- A new website: no pages indexed not a single redirect very similar content to the old website (a third duplicate) 3- An agressive SEO compain I think you all know what google can think of a situation like this!! Unfortunately for me, I didn't pay enogh attention to all these parameters and was thrown from the second page to nowhere in the SERP. Sorry, that wasn't nowhere, that was 179th position if I remember well and we all know this is nowhere!! When I look back to all the 404s google received while crawling my website, I kind of think google isn't "touchy", it is just doing its job honestly. July 10th, 2007: let's fix that business! I didn't really understand was going on and I thought it was just a bug or a google update (the old dance). When the situation stayed unchanged for some days, I decided to do some indepth research to find the source of the problem. That's when I figured out what was really going on: the summary above. So I started correcting by uploading an .htaccess with all the necessary redirections, writing new articles to reduce the duplicated content ratio, reoptimizing some of the pages, using the url removal tool provided by google (very useful)... Now all I could do is wait and hope for google to forgive me This waiting period - probably the most difficult in a SEOer's life as you feel you can do nothing about it - lasted for more than two weeks. Two long weeks during which you have all the time you need to hesitate, suffer, doubt... but, thanks to my past experiences, I kept saying to myself "you must give the guy enough time to see that you are trustworhty again", "google is the best search engine, he is clever enough, do you think he will miss a quality website?"... Yesterday: back to the elite Thanks to all my efforts, patience and of course the quality of the google algo I am back to where I was on the rankings. This is one of the rare moments when a SEOer is happy and willing to restart the advanture. However, I will allow myself some days off before comming back to busines. I am sure that some of you have also experienced hard times doing SEO but you all know that experiences like this are the best way to learn. I hope you can benefit from this thread and even comment on similar situations. Thank you for reading. Regards.