File under: Don't make the same mistakes I made... or maybe not

One of the reasons I more or less abandoned chucklinart.com over the past year is that I was focused on another site, Survive Unemployment! A little over a year ago, you see, I became totally unemployed. Finding a job seemed impossible so I started trying to make money in a million ways. I thought I would try my hand at the internet publishing business, among other things, and I had a great idea.

I noticed through the Google keyword research tool that the word "unemployment" and various phrases around it get millions of searches per month, and I knew that if I built a site around that theme, it would get lots of search love.

It took me a year, but I did get the site to a point of much search love. I owned five or ten often-searched unemployment-related key phrases and a whole bunch of less frequently searched phrases. The site had a constant, 24-7 flow of traffic. Like I said, it took me a year, and I added a ton of great content to the site over that time, making a huge effort to turn it into a valuable resource and a source of inspiration and entertainment, mainly for those trying, like me, to survive joblessness.

It was supposed to have been a social networking thing. I got the networking part right and programmed a totally cool site. The social part was more difficult without any kind of advertising or promotion budget. The user interface must have been off, too, because even my unemployed friends didn't bother to participate. But I knew it was a good idea. It became a one-man show, a blog, but it eventually did culminate in the fulfillment of my devious plot to get lots of targeted search traffic.

Then I did something kind of stupid (but not really), and I'm still scratching my head about the result: I went back to Plan A, hoping to capitalize on the traffic and turn it into a social networking site with free job postings, unemployment news, user-to-user messaging, location-matching, scheduling, events, etc.

As you might imagine, this involved dramatic changes to the front page messaging and taxonomy of the site. I tried to make it so that regular blog readers wouldn't notice much difference, but I wanted new users to see the opportunities. I also wanted desperately for the search engines to see the site as what it is, i.e., more than an unemployment blog.

Here's the ironic thing: In September, the site got a couple of big, heavy, organic incoming links from high PR sites, even a .org. Theoretically, that should bump the authority up nicely. You become a big site by having big sites refer to you. I had never been happier. All my hard work was paying off at last! After a full year of busting my behind, my little site was poised to harvest a much larger portion of those millions of "unemployment (whatever)" searches. My site would finally become the lively, collaborative resource it was always supposed to have been, and, yeah, might even help me pay a few bills.

Let me tell you, I was stoked like you can't believe.

Then a strange thing happened: The site lost a huge chunk of its search mojo. All those long-tail unemployment key phrases that I had worked so hard to dominate disappeared from the referrer section of the logs almost overnight. Site traffic fell noticeably. The cruelest part? The one phrase that I still dominate (and I had the top spot in Google for it last I checked): "unemployment blogs" and its sister "unemployment blog." Is the Google algorithm playing some cruel prank on me? I can hear the booming voices of the immortal ones of Mount Googleplex reverberating through the clouds: "Chuck! You will never be more than a lowly blogger! Now cast aside your foolish dreams and return to your humble station in life!"

It could not have been the new inbound links that messed things up for me. It had to have been the drastic changes I made to the heaviest elements of the on-site SEO, the new categorization scheme, and the radically altered sitemap.xml. Search engines like fresh content, but they don't like structural change. Of that I am confident based on this experience.

Fortunately, the site has attracted its share of regular readers so it's not a total waste of time to keep up with it. It gets traffic from those bigger sites that have deemed it worthy of a link, too. Still, I feel like I wasted a full year of careful SEO work in one brash move.

There is always a chance that maybe the algorithm is just digesting the changes and will lift my tenderly nurtured content to the top once again. If that is the case, I hope it hurries up. Some web surfing has shown that I am not the first one to have experienced this. Others who significantly switched up their sites had to wait and work for many moons before they got their sites back up there. I will, of course, keep you posted on the fate of Survive Unemployment! If it is dead on the search engines, so be it. If nobody -- not even my best unemployed loser friends -- uses it, so be it. It's a cool site, and I'm proud of it. Someday somebody will appreciate it.

The lesson here is that if you have a site that is already search optimized and getting a good flow of search traffic, do not mess with it. Don't get greedy like I did.