Freedom - 9:06 am on Nov 20, 2006 (gmt 0)

I'm seeing a 350 percent increase in traffic on 1 of our websites.

It started yesterday, Sunday.

Traffic for this website got nailed in the September 2005 shuffle and dropped from about 750 unique visitors a day to 200-225 average.

It has keep that average for the last 14 months and never varied by much.

I only made a few changes & improvements to the website since that time, opting for a "if it's not broken, don't fix it" SEO strategy.

Back in September 2005, when the big drop happened, I had a feeling it would come back some day to those levels, so I didn't do much to the website. I added some new content now and then, and picked up a Health on the Net certification for the site (HON), and changed a few links across all 200 pages.

There was a thread about (paraphrase) "Hands Off SEO" sometime earlier this year, but I can't remember the precise name of it.

I've been a member here since 2002 (different names) and have seen this Google Love & Hate relationship cycle with not only my websites, but several other senior members here as well.

Almost Forgot this Important Back Story:
One other thing I did back in September 2005 to study the drop was look on copyscape to see who was copying my material. I found a couple of sites that were and sent them Cease & Desist letters. They removed their duplicate copy of my content and then I posted CopyScape buttons and text warnings (Page Protected by COPYSCAPE DO NOT COPY!) on every page to prevent it from happening again. Those CopyScape buttons link to a "Copyright Warning" page where I told "the story" of how I nailed those content thieves and that we check regularly and being in a foreign country won't help you.

One of the content thieves was particularly bad. He had 27 keyword domains related to my subject. On those 27 domains he had taken content from about 50 of my best pages and served it up cloaked to the search engines - so only the search engines would see it. But those cloaked pages would then redirect to some of the most god awful "MFA" pages except they were MFYPN - Made for Yahoo Publisher Network.

I tracked down all those domains, found the guy's name that was associated with the DNS, and discovered he was in Canada. I then tracked down the name of a lawyer who was in his home town and posted a cc (carbon copy) at the bottom of the C&D letter to that lawyer. I also cc'd a copy to YPN with his YPN client number that I got from his ads along with quotes from their TOS that applied to content thieves.

Within about 24 hours, the spammer deleted all 27 domains from his server and wrote me back to tell me so.

I really don't know if all that content theft hurt me in Google back in September 2005, but I know it didn't help either. And content theft is still content theft, I couldn't let them get away with it.