For several years now I used the domain, onkels.org as my primary family and personal blog site. A few months ago I purchased daveonkels.com to serve as my go-forward blog homestead. While deeply entrenched in the process of launching Nectar, I didn’t have time to establish my new blog so I opted to create a placeholder lifestream in its place. With little effort, this temporary site consistently ranked in upper portion of Google’s page one search results. That is, until I made the decision to run a Google AdWords campaign using my own name as the keywords. My logic for doing such a thing was simple. I was curious to see how much an AdWords campaign would cost on a monthly basis because my partners and I were considering offering this to our Nectar customers as a add-on product. 

Within a day of launching the AdWords campaign, daveonkels.com dropped to page two, then three, then eleven, and ultimately disappering from Google’s organic search results all-together. As you might imagine, I was both perplexed and frustrated. Why would Google essentially punish me for running a paid AdWords campaign on their own network? I did a considerable amount of research and found others who cited similar stories but in their situations when they stopped the AdWords campaigns, their organic listings reappeared within a few days. In my case, daveonkels.com has returned to the organic listings, but on a paltry page eight rather than its original page one listing. Considering inbound links exist from every social network site I utilize such as LinkedIn, Vimeo, Facebook, etc, it’s hard to believe this ranking is even remotely reasonable.

I’m not one to roll over easily, so I quickly launched my personal blog, wrote several in-depth posts, conducted further SEO optimization, and leveraged information from Google’s webmaster tools. Unfortunately, even after working hard to reverse the situation, my ranking has not improved and I’m left wondering what I did to deserve the cold shoulder by Google. I’m confident that the situation will sort itself out eventually but not without leaving me quite jaded towards Google and its ranking methodologies.