Donal MacNally Hearing & Hearing Aids In Dublin
The search term above is a very competitive term for hearing aids in the Dublin region. Our challenge as a service provider is pushing our customer sites to rank for that term. That challenge, in the case of our customers, is that many of them have no great history on the web, or the sites that were there, didn’t rank because of technical issues and content quality.
One of the sites we deal with is for a premium independent brand, www.donalmacnallyhearing.ie . The original site did not rank well and there was some technical issues that caused some other difficulties. We designed and deployed a site that was designed to go after keywords and keyword phrases that the customer wanted to rank for. Of course one of the search terms that Donal MacNally Hearing would like to rank for is “hearing aids Dublin”We supported the site with citations and social media profiles to help build traffic. The site began to rank for many search terms that we had targeted and was constantly climbing.
The Big Until
That was until a month ago, we noticed some slipping of rankings, it was odd, we were slipping for one particular term whilst still climbing for others. Initially I thought that the problem was the competitive space. Many within the space have recently re-launched websites and are much more knowledgeable about what they are doing. However, when we undertook competitive analysis, that didn’t seem to be the case. Something else was affecting our rankings.
Backlinks, Spurious, Backlinks
Upon deeper inspection, we found two backlinks to the site that were at the very least spurious. One was from a Persian Porn website, the other from a Gym site. These links were definitely causing us some grief, we dis-avowed them and we have seen a slow recovery on the rankings. It is a bit irritating that after all of the good work a couple of links that we neither wanted or designed set us back. However, that is just the way it is in search engine land.
Lessons Learned
So we learned some interesting lessons from this one, firstly, just because the space is competitive, it doesn’t mean that your competitors are affecting you. Secondly, monitoring links is exceptionally important, don’t expect a warning. We have changed our processes to monitor links so we can reduce the possibility of this happening again. You need to consider these hard won lessons as well.
