When thinking about business online, remember that website usability significantly affects it’s popularity. That is why Website development specialists should always think how easy it will be for users to perform the necessary actions on your site — for example, searching for a product, filling out an order form, checking shipping costs, etc. So, what are the most effective ways to make an e-commerce site usable and therefore, more attractive? In fact, this subject is still being researched. This research involves a wide variety of tests: from user groups testing to human eye movements fixation examination to analyze which Web page elements are noticed first.

I added one of those free polls to a client’s site a few weeks back, and today I was supposed to remove it. Then I noticed something I somehow missed when I copied and pasted the original snippet of code to their site: there was a 1 pixel graphic linking to an online casino and there was alternate image text with gambling keywords.

For it’s target keywords, I noticed that the site had dropped from #4 to page one of Google, to #11. It consistently ranked well for several years, so I can only imagine that linking to a bad neighborhood got it hit with penalties. I removed the poll, but is the damage done?

Will the site bounce back from this?

My personal thought is that I would expect it to return. I’m confident that slipping to #11 is not a penalization, just a common drop in rankings.