So you’ve optimised the page beyond belief. It’s got a thousand decent links to it and a couple of very decent links. It’s very well linked to via your internal link structure. It’s linked to from your home page, it’s got a nice H1 tag, a good page title element, a unique meta description, original content, it doesn’t link out to any site other than sites that already Google trusts enough to rank no1 for certain terms….hell, it even used to be on the first page of Google for the chosen term out of 850 million results. It’s a Page Rank 6, it’s also linked to from a couple of other sites in the top pages in Google serps for the competing term.

Rankings improve, site-wide, for many different terms. The domain it’s on is a PR 7, spidered very frequently by Google. It seems solid, trusted and stable.

So why the hell, for the last month, is the page on the 13th page of the results for the key phrase in Google - ie Land Of Internet Obscurity?

That’s what we were wondering, when faced with the above situation. Something had to be wrong, but what could it be? The page was semantically correct, and cached, and should be ageing well. After a few weeks pondering the result every now and again, when I had the time (what a commodity!) I decided to give it a bit of closer inspection.

And there it was.

A broken link.

How could we have been so stupid. On the surface, a minor headache (every sites got broken links, right?) but could it be a much more serious obstacle to higher ranking even in 2007? Could one link negate a lot of other hard work and effort?
So we fixed it. Guess what, 2 weeks later we’re on page one again.

Now lets not forget, the Google Search Results are calculated by what some would call a magic formula that nobody really knows in it’s entiriety, and so serps are subject to wild fluctuations - and you can never quite tell which was the reason for a rise of fall.

But let’s just say i’ll be making sure I revisit even the most basic “best practice” seo / web design principles, like broken links, in future, and not just focus on finding the next thing that works.

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