I’ve excerpted a portion of the story below:
Over the past months, however, organic traffic from Google.com dropped from an average of 1’000 or so visitors / day to exactly zero. In sympathy, sales dropped along side, resulting in perhaps one or two sales per day or less, mostly from people who stumbled over the site by chance or by recommendation. For some reasons our pages were either removed completely from Google’s index or have been tagged “supplemental result” (for a possible explanation, see below at “Other consequences”). Obviously, we could still pay for ads but that would never make up for the loss in traffic and, hence, revenue. Also, while we realize that Google owes us nothing, we are not inclined to reward Google for dropping our site. The little traffic coming from localized versions of Google or from Yahoo and MSN doesn’t convert to revenue at all. We didn’t find a way to remedy this situation because, although being a multi billion dollar company, Google doesn’t seem to have a phone number.
Anyway, the resulting revenue from the current sales is far too low to maintain this site, to continue development of the software and to provide customers with good, useful, timely, and free support. We have therefore decided to call it quits and release all our barcode software into the Public Domain.
The moment I read this I couldn’t help but shake my head in disappointment. This is a company that, apparently, made some sort of error that affected their Google rankings (they fell into supplemental, but are still ranked at Y! and MSN). As a result, instead of hiring a knowledgeable SEO firm to review their site and get them back into the SERPs, they concluded that, since organic search referrals from Google were their primary source of conversions, their only recourse was to make their software free and shut down their business.
So why didn’t they contract for SEO services? Were they not aware SEO actually exists and can help with problems such as this? Were they under the impression that SEO only involves submitting to directories for $29.95? It seems to me that we’ve got a long way to go in terms of marketing our industry and the kinds of services we can provide if companies (even fairly small ones) are so clueless to SEO/M that they shut down their business if they suddenly fall into supplemental at Google. Granted, this a pretty extreme case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but I’m fairly certain it happens far more than we realize: a company will drastically change its business model or give up on e-commerce if/when organic search traffic drops suddenly.
I’d be interested to hear what people think about this story and what needs to change in the search industry to raise awareness of our field. Also, if anyone feels like digging deeper and attempting to figure out what happened on Wolf Software’s site to kill their rankings , I’m sure we’d all love to hear about it.
