Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

What to Do When Google Hiccups
About a month ago, my search engine optimization for a client's site went straight down the toilet.

First page rankings dropped to sixth or seventh page. Keywords that had been making steady progress toward the first page suddenly dropped out of the top 100.

I've seen this before. I've had sites that completely disappeared from the rankings for a month, only to come back stronger than ever.

I kept on eye on the SEO forums to see if anyone identified any major shakeups. Seeing none, I encouraged my client to ride it out and see where we were in a month.

It got worse
But then the worst happened: my client decided to become an SEO expert.

Every time I talked to him, he had just read a new article with some new reason that we might have been penalized.

"Penalized?" I said. "We're not doing anything outside Google's terms of service. Why would they penalize us for following their guidelines?"

"But maybe they think we aren't." He replied. "Maybe they THINK we're doing something wrong and they're penalizing us because of it. Maybe if we fix what they think we're doing wrong, they'll give us our rankings back."

"How do we fix something we're not doing wrong?"

We went on and on repeatedly with this conversation, him wanting me to leap into a frenzy of SEO tweaks, me urging patience. In the end, we did nothing -- except for two strategies I'll describe later.

What happened?
So what's the situation a month later?

A lot of the first page rankings are right back where they were. Ones that were climbing toward the first page are climbing again. Some pages still seem stuck back in Google purgatory, but, overall, things are returning to normal.

From what I've seen over the years, I've come to a conclusion: Google sometimes hiccups.

I don't know why. Maybe it's a technical thing. Maybe it's an intentional thing they do from time to time to see whether the owner of a well-optimized site will panic and start making all sorts of search-engine manipulative tweaks the instant their rankings drop. I simply don't know.

But I know that making major changes at the onset of a hiccup like this is just wasted effort.

The best thing to do is to ride it out for a month. If Google has made a change that specifically targets something you do, by the end of that month, the SEO forums will have identified it and you can take action to fix it.

Two strategies to deal with a hiccuping Google
But I've found two important strategies to carry out when you experience a hiccup.

First, keep moving ahead with whatever white-hat SEO techniques you're using to improve your rankings. Keep promoting your site and product; keep building links.

Second, add some promotional activities that aren't targeted toward improving your rankings. Find ways to bring visitors to your site in ways that aren't dependent on them finding you through the search engines.

Because of doing these two things, traffic barely dropped for my client during this rankings hiccup. His site now comes back not only potentially stronger with Google, but also with new sources of visitors that have nothing to do with Google.
Jeff

Labels: search engine optimization