I had the chance to meet Matt Cutts (http://www.mattcutts.com / Head of Google’s search quality/spam team) Matt was a very approachable guy who wasn’t at all bothered by my interruption of his lunch.
A bit of background, Textkit had been suffering from low to no search results for keyword phrases we dominated in the past. We were not ranking at all for terms which are critical to new visitors finding us, like ‘learn latin’ and ‘learn ancient greek’ and for terms that are not even that competitive like, ‘Goodwin greek grammar’
I gave Matt my business card with the Textkit URL on the back and 7 days later, I see this in my Sitepoint search position reports:
Problem solved! I think Texkit was under some kind of penalty which was dampening results. People could find us if they searched for Textkit but that was about it. All the green in the reports shows the keyword position going from basically no results to ranking well. Traffic is up 30% and new learners are finding us again!
I had been trying to get Google’s attention on the matter with no luck through their webmaster tools, making a request a couple times a year. SWEET - thanks for helping us out Matt![/url]