Late last year we carefully migrated over 95% of our URLs from id-oriented query-strings to keyword-rich, descriptive directory-style URLs. It’s a pain in the bum, but benefits both our users and search engine spiders as it offers memorable URLs that offer precise visibility into each page’s cotent. We also improved up our page titles, descriptions, and body content to make the pages easier to index and present in results.

After I got over the heart-attack of having all results disappear from search results until Google was able to return a second time and confirm our changes we’re permanent, I pleasantly watched many of our top keywords get back to first page rankings, and many of our lesser keywords push far ahead into top-20 and top-30 placements.

But dear Google, you keep losing our ‘dog.’ For 8 long weeks googling the term ‘dog’ did not return a www.dogster.com listing in the top 200. Then on March 7th I noticed we ranked 126th for ‘dog’ and then two weeks later on March 26th dogster.com we ranked 17th. I mistakenly thought our lost dog was found for good. Nope. It’s just a week later and our site has hardly changed and you won’t find Dogster.com when searching for ‘dog’ until the 450th result … and then it’s for a subdomain, dogblog.dogster.com.

The glaringness of the problem became clear last night when I saw via Google’s Webmaster tools (which are excellent and quite evolved) that Google considers ‘dog’ the second most common term on our site. It’s 3 above ‘dogs,’ a term for which we rank ninth overall on a Google search. Heck when I search for ‘dog’ just within dogster.com, Google finds 738,000 matching pages.

So dear Google why are you dogging us so heard about ‘dog’. Why are you being a complete dog about it? Can you throw this dog a bone and fix this?