Backup Anytime

Regular readers who read our posts from RSS, actual URL address or link may not be aware but Backupanytime.com are currently suffering great difficulty with Google positioning. For some considerable time we enjoyed number 1 position in Google for our favoured search terms. Indeed we were in positions 1 and 2 for many. Additionally, many similar appropriate search terms listed us on the first page in Google. More recently Google sitelinks were added to our website.

Last week we noticed that a new post on our blog was taking considerable time to become indexed. This drew our attention as we had become used to blog posts being indexed in Google within fifteen minutes. We took no action and put it down to crawl speeds. We do not need 15 minute indexing anyway.

Time passed and the situation worsened. Today, backupanytime.com is more or less off the Google radar. A search for site: www.backupanytime.com does show two results for us in positions one and two. None of the other pages shown are from our site. A search for “backupanytime.com” does show the very presentable sitelinks results. Other than a few other highly appropriate searches, we just are not in Google to the extent we were up to last week.

We are still trying to make sense of this. Remember, backupanytime is a small site. The static site only undergoes a couple of changes a week. The blog only receives an average of one new post per day. We have never bought a link. We have never joined a link referral program. We have never hosted illegal content. All of our content is original. We do not use email as a marketing tool. We have never sent spam. A check of our Google webmaster tools shows no difficulty bar a small number of long or short meta descriptions. We address these ongoingly and our web people tell us this is common among well managed sites and is not the issue.

Add to all of this that we have not received any complaint from any source and our site has not been hacked and you can see that this problem is not just a great concern but also very difficult to figure out. We posted a re-inclusion request with Google. We had never had to do this before and therefore did not know what was likely to happen. We got back a message explaining that the request would be looked at and this could take a number of weeks. Does this mean that Google thinks we have breached behaviour guidelines or is this a generic response to a re-inclusion request? We don’t know.

The reason I am focusing on Google here is that we are still represented favourably by the other major search engines. About half of our traffic comes from search engines. The remainder is split fairly evenly between direct search and referrals. Most of our search engine traffic comes from Google.

In the interim our traffic is down about 30%

Remember we are talking here about a small, well managed site which focuses on the niche market of online backup and has enjoyed success in search engines for online data backup over a long period of time. This isn’t complicated, has worked and there has been no significant change in approach in the recent past.

If this is to be resolved in the coming weeks then there is no long term difficulty. The problem with this best case scenario is that we will have learned no lessons.

The worst case scenario would be unthinkable only we absolutely have to consider and prepare for it.

Have you had an experience like this? Do  you know the cause or the solution?

All genuine responses appreciated.