For some years I have been maintaining the website of the RYA Endeavour Sailing School based in Puerto Calero Lanzarote. At the beginning of our collaboration, where I took care of content and content management system updates, the page was hit by the Google Penguin update. Pages that were found with search queries on the first page of Google's search results were suddenly not found at all or were found in far-off places.
The reason for the penalty was that the company that took care of the search engine optimization of the site had manipulated Google's search results by keyword stuffing and cloaking (creating content specifically for search engine crawlers). Of course, the SEO company did not take its responsibility, but stopped its activities. After detailed analysis it became clear to us that the effort was too great to delete the several thousand external links from hundreds of articles linked to our site. We decided for a radical but effective step by running the website over a new domain. After several months of hard work, we managed to bring the site with the most important keywords back to the top of Google search results.
After this problem was solved I updated the content management system from Joomla 2.5 to Joomla 3 and completely redesigned the website. A news blog was added to the site, which we recently upgraded with various video tutorials and a YouTube channel.
For marketing in the social media, I linked the blog of the website to the Facebook page of the sailing school and integrated the Open Graph metadata on the website.
To increase the visibility of the relevant company information and the findability of the website, I also created an Endeavour Sailing Google MyBusiness and TripAdvisor page.
