We all know how hard it can be when you are hit by a penalty and we also know that Google is not afraid of hitting companies no matter how big they are. Back in 2013 Google famously sideswiped Interflora which we covered in an article and two subsequent follow-up pieces.
We were therefore not surprised to see this morning that Serenata Flowers appears to have disappeared from Google organic search. Here’s a picture of what you get when you Google their name;
After their PPC advert the top billing goes to Facebook followed by Twitter and then various voucher code and review sites, but their main website is completely missing. Furthermore when you search for any of their normal search phrases i.e. flowers plus a location they don’t appear.
It is unusual though not unheard of for a company to completely disappear from the search results and almost inevitably when you can’t find your website with a named brand search, you are under a Google penalty.
Of course, sites can be hit for any number of reasons but a quick look at some of the metrics might give us a clue to why they have disappeared.
If it were me looking for the reason (disclaimer here – I have nothing to do with them or their SEO) I would go back to the middle of this year. SEMRush highlights a big traffic surge around May of this year which, according to their figures, doubled the organic traffic overnight.
Add to this a cheeky link spike at the same time which is clearly shown by Majestic and…..
OK, so this isn’t a smoking gun but it’s somewhere to start looking for clues.
Whatever has happened we wish whoever is dealing with this all the best with the clean up. It probably won’t be easy….
