Roller Coaster Ride for Hunter Valley Website

What a difference a day makes! Within three weeks of launching our new Hunter Valley Vineyards project the site was indexed by major search engines but it isn't all smooth sailing for Wine Country's newest site as we explain below.

The first search engine to list the website was a relatively unknown search engine known as Anoox closely followed by Jayde. Initial rankings on these engines were extremely encouraging and we were eagerly awaiting our rankings to appear for major search engines such as Microsoft Live, Google and Yahoo.

Although the major engines had indexed the website, we knew that it would take considerably longer to be formally 'ranked' by the search engines, effectively placing the website within search engine results. Our experience with Central Coast Australia showed that Microsoft Live would be the first to rank (typically around 5 weeks from submission) but on Saturday night 25th July our rankings came online for the first time.

Friends and family were the first to hear of the news as shouts of elation (and a little yahoo-ing) came from the study at the other end of the house, effectively interupting the late night game of Pictionary Charades in progress. The results were fantastic with the website effectively winning the rankings for our key term "Hunter Valley Vineyards" and many of our secondary targets including "Hunter Valley Bed and Breakfast" and "Hunter Valley Resorts".

As a result, this week we spread the good news to the wine country community mailing out to local tourism operators within the region and advising our success.

Unfortunately however, by the next afternoon all our results had vanished!

What appears to have happened is that we are experiencing what used to be referred to as 'the Google Dance' where our website has been updated on some Microsoft Live servers but not on others. We're confident however that our initial rankings will be online again soon and we'll continue to monitor the website over the next week and provide updates here as they come to hand.

Troy White