How NOT to rank your site in Google

We were asked today by a company referred to us by one of our IT partners to help get their site ranking for a range of competitive keywords, none of which they were coming up for. In fact so bad was their current non-existent SEO that their business wouldn’t even appear when searching in Google for them by name!

Concerned that despite having had a site up for over two years they couldn’t even get a ranking for their own non generic brand name we decided to take a deeper look…

The site had been set NOT to be indexed by Google in the VITAL robots.txt file. It really was as simple as that. This is akin to have the sign on your shop door set to CLOSED. For over two years. It beggars belief!

In a case like this it can be as simple as flicking a switch to get the site showing up in search results, although of course this is only the first step in embarking upon a successful SEO campaign. After all, they have some serious catching up to do now!