As a webmaster who has worked for 13 month (fulltime) on this page it is really disappointing.
My (personal) lessons learned:
- never use google analytics again (keep the site metric data on your site)
- when your competitor use black hat, dont be afraid to use also black-hat techniques (google will never punish a niche, who should rank after that?)
- give a sh** about unique high quality content
- do not engage employes to build up expertise - pay for good spinning tools + content agencies
- do not wasting ~5 weeks to get your page fully responsive an earn a pagespeed core of 97/100 and 99/100.
- give a sh** about w3c standards (and safe 2 weeks)
- do not wasting time building a custom amp-framework
- do not wasting time build up a rest-server to serve the data comfotable to mobile web apps
- do not pay money for the fastest cdn service
- do not implement a slack mvc php framework to get the fastest user experience for millions of product pages
- do not use rich-snippets
- do not instruct your authors to create a selfie and write down the bio in short form
- and ah... dont wasting time to create correct sitemaps (today not helpful)
- do not create a usefull page about us, imprint, terms of use...
- do not deliver your images in responsive dimensions or webp
- do not have an employe for manage your social media accounts
- do not redirect wrong urls via 301 to the next best matching url (domain.com/jacket-brown-size-8 --- 301 ---> domain.com/jacket-brown)
- do not "noindex" useless pages (favorites, products with less content)
- do not use a fully controlled canonical/noindex/pagination system
My (personal) dos:
- use static html pages (h1,h2,h3,b,u,i,a,strong) and maybe images (dont forget the alt tag -> use keyword as often you can!)
But wait - we did something mayber really wrong:
We did not use the meta-keyword tag...!
Thank you Google!