Pre­vi­ously, my wife and I have pur­chased a few items from The Children’s Fur­ni­ture Com­pany (here­after referred to as CFC); its good qual­ity stuff, slightly pricier per­haps, but worth that extra penny con­sid­er­ing the beat­ing it’ll get from our kids over the years. The CFC designed and built their own cus­tom ranges and would deliver and install at your home; their cus­tomer ser­vice was always per­son­able and helpful.

When they first noti­fied me (by email) that they were shut­ting down, my wife and I mut­tered about it being a ‘sign of the times’ and other such doom laden prophe­cies. So, it was with some sur­prise when I got a later email from them say­ing that they real rea­son they were shut­ting down was because of Google’s Pen­guin update.

Being top of Google’s search results for selected key terms can make (or break) a busi­ness, so it’s tempt­ing to try to get to those posi­tions by nefar­i­ous means, per­haps by employ­ing inap­pro­pri­ate SEO link build­ing for exam­ple. This is exactly the behav­iour that the CFC deployed. They had wanted to get to the top of the rank­ings and so had employed a SEO agency to help deliver that. The SEO agency had gen­er­ated a ton of exter­nal links to the CFC web­site, which Google ini­tially applied a pos­i­tive rank­ing to. Then came the Pen­guin update (May 2012) and Google re-categorised those links as spam and demoted the CFC to obliv­ion of the sub-pages of its results pages.

What Pen­guin meant for the CFC was that they no longer gen­er­ated the level of sales that they did pre­vi­ously, and as a small busi­ness they did not have the funds or time to re-do their web­site or fix the links. They decided, there­fore to call it a day and shut up shop. They were not alone, the Pen­guin update affected many thou­sands of businesses.

What this cau­tion­ary tale goes to show is that nat­ural SEO is always best and that you should pro­ceed with cau­tion when select­ing an SEO spe­cial­ist. It also shows how dif­fi­cult it is for small busi­ness to react to major changes in their mar­ket­place. As Neils Bohr (the Dan­ish physi­cist) said ‘Pre­dic­tion is very dif­fi­cult, espe­cially about the future.’

The good news, for cus­tomers of the Children’s Fur­ni­ture Com­pany, is that it appears the busi­ness was pur­chased and a new owner has re-launched the web­site and is offer­ing pretty much the same range of fur­ni­ture. Hope­fully, they’ll be more cau­tious when con­sid­er­ing how to get to the top of Google’s search results.