Mediaboss Marketing

Some people love horror stories and others dont, but probably at some point, all of us have experienced a terrifying twist in life.

This inspired the SE Ranking team to reach out to SEO and marketing experts from all over the world and ask them to share some nightmare-of-a-case stories they had in their careers.

Our assumption was that since SEO is so fickle and marketing success depends on so many factors, our fellow colleagues will surely have some enticing stories to share.

Luckily, they didnt mind dragging their skeletons out of the closet.

This article is all about mistakes that led to devastating consequences.

From lack of caution or vision to unexpected obstacles and bad luck the reasons behind their marketing failures vary.

But fortunately, most of the stories had a happy ending.

And they all once again prove that the road to success is paved with failure.

They teach us that every mistake we make will ultimately steer us in the right direction as long as we learn the lesson and retain the necessary vigor to keep going.

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A warning had been on the Wikipedia article for two years.

Then early July 2020, a new warning appeared.

Two weeks later, the Wikipedia article about me had been deleted by the administrators.

Within a week, my entity had disappeared from Googles Knowledge Graph and the knowledge panel on my personal Brand SERP had gone.

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A major nightmare for someone who calls himself The Brand SERP Guy.

Worse, a week later, the Wikipedia article about my folk-punk band from the 90s was gone.

Two days later, the article about my TV series from the 90s was gone, too.

Seems someone at Wikipedia had it in for me.

In fact, truth be told, it was my own fault.

In the interests of experimenting to see how much I could feed Googles Knowledge Graph and control the knowledge panel on my personal Brand SERP, and those of my music group and TV series, I had (over) edited all three Wikipedia articles.

Which is against the rules.

So what happened?

Read on, because this horror story actually has a redemptive ending.

I rebuilt it all, took control of the entities, learned a lot about knowledge panels, and got some amazing insights into how the Knowledge Graph functions.

I panicked when the Wikipedia page was deleted and moved the structured data about me on my site from the home page to a dedicated About Page.

That turned out to be a mistake.

As described, the knowledge panel disappeared and the entry in the Knowledge Graph got deleted.

Once again, my own fault.

This is the folk-punk group I mentioned earlier.

There had previously been a mix-up of information in the knowledge panel due to the ambiguity of the name, but last year I had sorted it out using:

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The deletion of the Wikipedia article brought back the mix-ups.

However, because of all the work I had done and the schema markup I had added, Google now saw my site as the main authority about the band.

That means I could now change things quite easily.

Including the description in the knowledge panel (updates take 10 minutes).

I had control.

This is the cartoon characters and TV series I mentioned earlier.

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Following the deletion of the Wikipedia article about the TV series, the Knowledge Graph entity remained in place, and the information in the knowledge panel remained as-was, except the description, which disappeared.

Three weeks later that was back, but this time from my site (it has since switched to the official site).

Once again, my site and the schema markup I provide was Googles fallback, the second-best source of information about the entity.

Once again, the deletion of the Wikipedia page gave me control.

Every entity needs a home.

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Preferably on your site.

For all the three entities, my site was the home the source of information Google uses as its point of reference in the absence of a Wikipedia article.

It appears that, when a substantial piece of information about an entity such as Wikipedia disappears, that is the fallback crutch Google uses to reassure itself that the Knowledge Graph is correct.

The schema markup on your site that describes you and related entities is vitally important to Google in its understanding of those entities and its confidence in its understanding of those entities.

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The good news is that by leveraging the (rather groovy) entity-based markup provided by WordLift, in just 6 weeks I created a completely new entity in the Knowledge Graph and rebuilt the entire knowledge panel better than ever.

Google now uses my site as the reference for information about me (rather than Wikipedia).

And that means what appears in the knowledge panel is now (semi) controlled by me and no longer affected by anonymous Wikipedia editors who know nothing about me, and what information is important about me.

Brilliant!

Nobody likes to see their organic traffic and rankings drop.

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When a drop happens, though, you can usually figure out the cause.

But the scariest moment for me was when a client faced a traffic and rankings drop with no apparent cause.

Overnight, this client lost half their organic traffic.

The terms they had ranked highly for were simply gone.

There was no algorithm update, no changes to the website, no alterations to the content there wasnt even a surge in server errors (or any error) in any tool we looked at.

Competitors hadnt changed anything either.

There was no growth in external backlinks.

Search Console wasnt reporting a manual action.

The content was highly authoritative within this clients industry and the company had (and still has) a strong brand reputation.

Mysteriously, overnight, this companys organic traffic was simply gone.

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Any traffic drop is scary enough but what made this a true nightmare scenario was that we couldnt find any cause no matter where we looked.

For some unknown reason, Google decided to kick this site out of the index.

Without a cause, there wasnt a clear place to begin recovering the traffic.

Do we start by fixing content?

Keep looking for a technical problem?

Maybe something happened with links?

Like any good mystery, the solution is only to be found via careful investigation.

So, we pushed through the nightmare and kept digging.

As we dug in, we started to find some hidden and underlying problems that had been lurking on this site for years.

The phrase legacy code has always worried me but this project made me realize that legacy code is one of the scarier parts of any website.

Given how scary legacy code can be, we maybe ought to rename it.

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Maybe zombie code would be more fitting?

Thankfully, this story ended well.

After months of digging, we figured out that Googles bots had stumbled across one of the nastier legacy areas of the site and deranked the website given what they had found there.

That one bad section of the site had caused Google to reevaluate the website in a negative light.

Here is the original post:
7 Marketing Disasters That Turned Out to Be Precious Lessons - Search Engine Journal