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My Biggest Search Engine Positioning Mistake

Author: Charlie Cook   |   February 8th, 2005

It is in the past so I can admit it. I made a huge search engine positioning mistake that was a drag on my site traffic and it took me forever to figure it out. As the author of one of the first books on search engine positioning it was a little embarassing to say the least. Here’s the mistake I made and how to avoid it.

Originally my marketing site could be found at www.charliecook.net. This site benefited from some top search engine placements in Google and other popular search engines thanks to applying the few simple guidelines I detail in Creating Web Sites That Sell . Traffic from Google was growing steadily, that was until I made the following mistake.

About ten months ago I rebuilt my site and moved the content to the current location at www.marketingforsuccess.com Thanks to my strategy of using articles to attract prospects and my huge distribution list of online and offline editors who publish my articles, my website traffic continued to grow, but I noticed I couldn’t find my site in Google. Yikes, what was going on. Preiously I’d been in the top 10-30 spots for every one of my keywords.

During the last six months I’ve worked closely with a search engine postioning firm to try and fix this situation and get listed in Google again. After trying a variety of tactics which worked to boost my listings in every other search engine, we tried removing all the original pages from my www.charliecook.net site. I had left them up under the assumption that since they were originally well placed they’d continue to draw traffic which would be automatically forwarded to my new site. Big mistake!

It turns out that Google didn’t like having similar content pages on both my sites, even though the first had a permanent redirect on it to my current site. About a week ago I removed all the pages from my initial site, resubmitted it and my current site to Google. This week my site is back in the top 10-30 positions in Google for most of my keywords.

Lesson learned. If you create a second site for your content with a new url, after a month or so, delete the original and just have the domain forward to your new domain. Want to learn how to avoid more web marketing mistakes, check out Creating Web Sites That Sell – Charlie Cook

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