Woolworths – Company Focus. Woolworths has obviously had a bad time of things lately.
With the company going into administration and the 1000s of employees facing unemployment just weeks before Christmas, it’s not been happy reading. Woolworths Decline.
However, one shining light for the Woolworths brand over the last 12 months has been their online presence. Whether or not they have been selling products through their website is another discussion, but their positioning in the search engines has been good –
and for certain keywords, it has been excellent.
But then this happened:
The Reason: Woolworths Website holding page throughout the site
This appears on every page linked to. So all the readable content has gone, all meta and all internal links. This blank page is all Google sees. Furthermore bounce rate is therefore 100% and we all know what that means.
Woolworths' keywords fell off a cliff in mid November in Google UK
Previously Woolies was in the top five SERPS for “Toys” “Outdoor Toys” “camp Rock” and many other children’s related purchases. At Christmas, these would be searched millions of times and the purchase rate is for many retailers better in December than for the rest of the year put together. So why did they take the site down?
As you will see above from our Keyword line tracker Woolworths.co.uk the effect of the maintenance page is stark. Woollies online has now taken the same hit as its fellow High Street Stores have – and fallen off a cliff.
Is there a way back?
The Woolies site was getting some very good positons, and closing it down like this, before the business has properly shut-up shop, seems premature. Furthermore, the site itself had a PageRank of 5, certainly a sellable asset to anyone in retail.
But what we can conlude from this is that links, by themselves, will not get you good results.