My relationship with SEOmoz began in the second quarter of 2012, approximately 20 minutes after receiving a rather alarming message in our Google Webmaster Tools account.

Up until this point life had been treating me rather well. Our website ranked relatively highly in an incredibly competitive industry, our sales continued to improve year on year and I had just become a father for the first time. I was looking forward to taking a step back from the business for a few months and spending time with our beautiful son.

Suddenly our orders were cut in half overnight with no evident reason as to why. We had always strived to offer the very best in customer service and our customer retention rate was fantastic so why would things simply dry up so quickly and without any warning?

In a bid to try to understand what could have happened I logged in to my Google Webmaster Tools account and was greeted with what is probably quite a familiar message to many of you:

The Aftermath

I felt physically sick. I had mortgages on several properties, a new family to support and a dozen staff that all relied on my company for their livelihoods. The change in the business overnight was both jarring and unforgiving. As I investigated deeper the scale of the task and the length of time that it would take to resolve became more and more apparent.

My feelings of despair were mixed with feelings of anger as I asked myself how it was possible that one company with a monopoly on the search market could suddenly decide that we weren’t worthy of being included in their results. Who gave them the right to potentially ruin my life without a word of warning? 

As mentioned, many of you have probably seen this message while working for clients but it hurts a lot more and it feels a lot more personal when the target is a site that you rely upon to physically keep a roof over your head.

Reality Check

Soon my feelings of anger towards Google were redirected as feelings of anger towards those that had landed us in this situation – specifically the SEO company that we had been paying good money to every month for link building services and advice. I had been incredibly naïve and had taken pretty much everything they had said as being the truth.

For example, I acted in good faith when they recommended farming out ten years’ worth of articles that I had written for a local paper to various article distribution websites. The article distribution consisted of rewriting paragraph after paragraph to make the article sufficiently different to avoid Google picking up on the duplication. 

Our link building reports consisted of page after page of URL’s which now pointed to us and none of them seemed particularly relevant to our niche. We even once used a piece of automated URL submission software after following the advice that a bad link won’t do you any harm but a good link might do you some good – ‘it doesn’t matter if you submit to 4,000 sites as even if 3990 of them are ignored Google might still give you some benefit for the remaining 10.’

Even at the time what we were doing felt wrong. 

I didn’t listen to my gut and continued to pay out a monthly fee for these services - the company was well-established, they seemed to be getting us good results and I didn’t have a clue when it came to understanding what search engines wanted. Of course, it wasn’t to last; along came the Google Penguin to nip us viciously in the backside as punishment for our feeble and misguided efforts.

What I Learned and Steps Taken

The majority of the people still reading will at this point be thinking ‘jeez, what an idiot’. In many ways they would be right but there would also be a degree of inaccuracy in this assumption; rightly or wrongly I chose to accept that search engine optimisation was not my forte and decided that I should listen to someone who had made it their business. At first this comforted me.

It took months but eventually I stopped blaming the situation on Google or the SEO Company and started looking back at myself and the decisions that I had made. In life I think everybody should listen to their own gut feelings; the majority of the time if your gut is telling you something is wrong then chances are that on one level or another this is the truth. 

I may have been right to accept my own limitations and get an external company involved but ultimately I had already concluded that what was being suggested to me was murky but proceeded anyway. I’ve lost count of the number of questions I’ve read in the SEOmoz Q&A forums that start with ‘This looks wrong but….’ before the user goes on to suggest a grey or black hat SEO technique that will ultimately land them in hot water. 

And Now...

This leads us to the present day; almost daily we achieve the removal of another couple of bad links and every few months we report our progress to Google. We’re unclear as to whether we are still under some kind of penalty but our responses from them have gone from the reiteration of:

"We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines"
to

"We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index your site. We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don't find any problems, we'll reconsider our indexing of your site."

As unclear as these messages are, I’m taking the change from a definite confirmation of a problem to a suggestion that it has been fixed as progress. Needless to say we’re still continuing to remove bad links, however.

The future for us involves factoring in some time every day to check out the SEOmoz forums, read through the blog posts and monitor the performance of our campaigns so that we can undertake as much of our own SEO work as possible. Of course, asking for advice from an external company is still a possibility but our rankings in Google are so important to us that it’s not something that we can leave unchecked again in the future or something that we simply ‘meddle’ in.

Recommendations for Businesses

It's customary on SEOmoz at this point to offer a few takeaways to the reader in the hope that they can garner something from the writer's experience. That having been said, someone somewhere once said that ‘It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others’ and if this is the case then the lesson you should take from this is to simply not do what we did.

There are many professional SEO experts that read this forum so I won't patronise them with these common sense points however to the newcomers there are several nuggets of advice that we can derive from my recent misfortune which I would urge you to heed:

• Don’t take short-cuts. There is no substitute for hard work.
• If something is important to you then you need to achieve a level of knowledge to ensure that you’re not being sold down the river for the sake of a quick buck.
• At the end of the day you and only you will be held accountable for what happens on your site; trying to blame someone else just doesn’t cut it.
• Listen to your gut; if something feels wrong then it probably is.

As for that pesky Penguin, I don’t resent him in the slightest although his communication could certainly have been a little better. The truth is that there were many people doing what we were doing and it wasn’t conducive to getting sites to focus on important factors such as content, reputation and relevance. With both Panda and Penguin these factors are more important than ever and this can only improve the experience offered to the user.