How I broke Google!!

Once again this mini disaster happened late on a Friday afternoon...seems to me that is when everything goes wrong.

Currently, I’m working on optimising the Neotechnology Business Systems’ website for search engines. This involves a lot of different little things like:

• Choosing keywords, some of ours being POS systems, point of sale, hospitality point of sale, restaurant point of sale, retail POS, fuel POS, any way am sure you get the picture.
• Including these keywords in your website content without reducing readability and relevancy – I used external contractors to rewrite much of ours!
• Filling in all the meta data for each page and the site overall.
• Increasing the links to our website and including some on ours.
• Ensuring there is new, relevant content on our website regularly.
• Listing the website on directories; and
• Including key words in the HTML title tag for a page.

There is more to add but most of this information is freely available on the web, which is where I got most of my hints and tips, although I have also done a number of workshops on the subject.

To see if these steps are working I am regularly checking Google to see where we rank on 8 specific key words. It is good to see if and how much progress the SEO (search engine optimisation) process is making. This particular Friday I was typing in a keyword eg Point of Sale, choosing pages from Australia and hitting Google Search when all of a sudden I kept getting an error which basically told me that I could not use Google anymore.

Thinking that it might be related to the words I was using I tried various non-POS related search terms and still no luck. I checked with the others in the office and Google was not working for them either. I handed the issue to our technical support team who promptly informed me that Google had blocked our IP for conduct which was against the terms and conditions of using Google. Basically Google thought we were using some sort of program to do something dodgy related to optimising our website for search engines!

We were all a little baffled by this...was I too efficient at checking our Google ranking making it look like a software program!?! Surely not!? Or was it one of the little applications I had downloaded to track certain keywords?!? We never did find out for certain...Google was up and working fine when we got into the office on Monday morning!

I have learned now that there are actually software products you can use to check the ranking of your website against specific keywords.