Several days ago I wrote a introductory article discussing the reason behind our search engine positioning for our key phrase “web design Brisbane” or lack thereof. At this point it would be insightful to begin keeping track of the position based on changes made every few days. Prior to adding several pages of content in our new website, our domain ranked approximately 400 for the search term. As Google displays 10 organic search results per page, that is page 40.
Once there were several pages of content and we began to turn our attention to improving the search position, our site ranked somewhere around 90. Page 9 is in reality just as ordinary as page 40. Most people won’t click past the first page let alone see page 9.
In the days since the first post several changes have taken place and most of these related to erroneous URL’s rather than any other method to gaining an improved rank for our web design studio.
In the Google index there were a number of web pages that appeared to be from our website but were not. They were URL’s from another website completely unrelated to our web design business and one that we have never had any affiliation with. These URL’s began to show up in our crawl errors as 404 errors.
After some initial research we discovered that some time ago when we moved our website to another server, a stray DNS record pointed our non www domain to another website. To the search engines it appeared that www.puremedia.com.au was our main web design website and puremedia.com.au was a clothing and accessories website.
That revelation helped further explain why our once prominent search position had been diminished. Not only did we not have a full website online for our studio as the holding page was in place but our non www domain linked to a complexity irrelevant website.
To rectify this error, our DNS details were updated and the erroneous URLs were removed from Google’s index. Within around 24 hours of the removal of the erroneous URL’s being removed, our position increase to around 68.
The main takeaway from this situation is that you should always direct your domain with and without the www prefix to the same server and website. This will ensure that there is a single point of origin for your website and will mitigate any possible DNS errors. The final lesson we have learnt is that while our clients remain our daily focus, we should always apply those same checks and balances to our own website and associated services.
