Resurrecting the Invisible Fence Guide

I mentioned not too long ago that the income I'd been earning from my pet fence guide AdSense case study was declining. That decline is due to its slow drift down the search engine results rankings. At one point, for example, the site ranked #2 on Google for the term “invisible fence”. Right now it's on the second results page, however. I want to move it back up, of course, so I thought I'd write some posts relating to that topic, with the Invisible Fence Guide (that's it's original name — more on that shortly) as the example.

Why Did The Rankings Change?

Search engine results are always in flux. This is true now more than ever. Google recently switched to a continuous update system rather than the interval-based updates they'd been using since the beginning. So if your income depends on natural search traffic, you have to pay attention to those rankings.

When you have a site that's lost its ranking, the first thing you want to do is a post-mortem to figure out why the ranking's been lost. That will help you determine which steps to take to fix things — if they're fixable!

So what happened to my invisible fencing guide? There are a number of issues at play here:

• The deliberate de-emphasis of the Invisible Fence trademark. As you may recall, the site drew the attention of Invisible Fence, Inc.'s lawyers who threatened to sue me for trademark violation because I was using their trademarks on a site that was advertising competitive products. Rather than fight them on this, I decided to change the site to accomodate most — but not all — of those demands. Naturally, de-emphasizing the term “invisible fence”, including removing that keyphrase from the domain, impacts the search engine rankings.
• The lack of new/updated content. The site's not been updated in a while, about the only thing I did to it recently was to put a note on the home page mentioning Taffy's early and unexpected demise.
• The use of duplicate content. Because it's a case study, the site creation was documented and split over several stages, which are all still live on the site. This, of course, means that there's duplicate content. A normal site wouldn't have these issues, at least not in this manner.
• Better SEO work by other sites. You think you're the only one worried about search engine rankings? The other sites are working on improving their rankings, too.
• Ugly session IDs mixed up in the URLs for the site. These should really be taken out.

Despite these issues, though, I think the rankings can be improved. This is especially true when you had a high-ranking site to begin with — which is why you need to use good SEO practices right from the start. It's easier to start high and fix a downward drift than to start low and work your way up.

Revisiting the Invisible Fence Guide

Let's start by revisiting the Guide to Invisible Fence, or the Guide to Electronic Fence and Pet Containment as it's now known. Remember what I wrote not too long about feeder blogs? I want to get the pages on my pet fence site noticed again. So I'll start by referring to them right here.

The guide is a very simple site, consisting of a dozen pages of content and an “about this site” page. Here are the content pages as they now sit:

1. Pet Fence Guide Introduction: Explains what the site is about — to describe why we decided to purchase and install an Invisibile Fence dog containment system even though our backyard was already fenced.
2. The warning signs we ignored: The clues we should have paid attention to that one or both of our dogs were trying to escape the back yard.
3. A dog escapes the back yard: The incident that led to the purchase of the Invisible Fence system.
4. The search for the escaped dog: This is when we made the decision to get an Invisible Fence system.
5. The Invisible Fence dealer's sales call: The visit from our local Invisible Fence dealer.
6. How Invisible Fence works: The basic technology behind the Invisible Fence system.
7. Installation of the Invisible Fence: How an Invisible Fence system is installed.
8. The Invisible Fence collar: What makes the Invisible Fence collar special.
9. Training the dogs to respect the Invisible Fence boundaries: The simple training procedure that keeps the dogs away from the Invisible Fence.
10. Repairing the Invisible Fence: How the Invisible Fence system was repaired when a car ran into our wooden fence and disrupted the Invisible Fence wiring.
11. Using the Invisible Fence system inside the house: How you can take advantage of the Invisible Fence collar for pet containment inside the house.
12. Pet Fence Guide conclusion: Generic concluding stuff.

There's also the About the Invisible Fence Guide page and of course the AdSense case study page linking all the different stages together.

So, what do I do next? What I need to do is move the pages out of the “Stage 4″ part of the site and into their “final” locations, which was always my initial intention but something I never did. Once I do that, I can work on configuring a robots.txt file to exclude the duplicate content pages from the search engines. But let's leave this for next time.

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Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense. Interesting name, interesting topic, interesting blog.

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