…. and so another chapter in the saga begins….sort of….my ambitious – some would say reckless and foolhardy – attempt to regain the good graces of Google search for a part of what was once one of Google’s favorite travel websites – www.OHWY.com

This chapter began a few weeks ago when I resurrected NMohwy.com which for about 8 months has been 301 redirected to www.ohwy.com/nm/   The redirection was thanks to recommendations by Google support, Google Engineers, and a major SEO firm.    So why defy all that brilliant conventional wisdom?   

Because things still aren’t working.   So I’m taking the blogged advice of Matt Cutts and “experimenting”

The basic story is that our major travel site – OHWY.com or “Online Highways”, was downranked by Google on February 2 of 2005.   The drop in traffic was severe – about half gone, and we had to lay off people and restructure the company.   On February 1 we had about 50,000 visits from Google searches and on February 3 we were down to about 5,000 which fell over the next few months to about 500.

The site had been growing for years and we’d set up domains like NMohwy.com which were specifically targeted to states – in this case New Mexico.   After the drop we were advised that consolidating the 12 or so domains into our “mother ship” of OHWY.com was advisable and we did it.