A few weeks ago we launched a number of channels on SKY.fm Radio. One of them was the Solo Piano channel, which has been gathering a healthy audience at a great pace organically - faster than many other channels we’ve launched in the past.

If you were to search for Solo Piano in Google over the next few weeks since the launch, you would see us ranking higher and higher, and at some point we hit the bottom of the first page. It’s a very small keyword combination in terms of search volume, so that in itself is not super impressive, but the speed was nice. Artists were gladly linking to us, word was spreading. 

And then about a week ago a miracle (bad one) happened. Our page got totally delisted for that keyword combination - no “solo piano”, no “solo piano radio”.  All other channel pages remained the same and didn’t get a hit for any of their respective keyword terms. If I search explicitly for “SKY.fm solo piano” then it does find the page, though it is listed below our forums. This suggests that whatever the filter at Google is, it certainly wacked us with a huge penalty.

We haven’t done any blackhat stuff, not even grey hat when it came to promoting this. The link just organically spread fast in its niche on, and I am guessing some Google algorithms didn’t like it and decided to sandbox it or otherwise apply some kind of an aging filter specifically for one sub-page.

Aaron Wall recently wrote about the risk of being screwed by social media marketing, maybe there was something to Google not always loving success after all.

I’ll keep you guys posted when the Solo Piano page comes back to life in the index, my guess is it will be a few months.