Wherefore art thou dot com?

by Rick Biederer

Often times when small businesses hire a search engine optimization consultant they believe they are purchasing services to attain them a specific ranking in the search engines and once bought, that ranking is now theirs.

In reality, no SEO specialist can promise specific results in terms of search engine position for a client and it may be wise to steer clear of a consultant that promises such.

After your search specialist has achieved higher rankings, and increased the profitability of your Web site, you may think that you are in the clear and that all your web troubles are behind you. Unfortunately, the only thing constant about search engine results is that they will change and that change can come at any time. There are three factors in ranking changes: you, your competitors or the search engines.

When your search results take a turn for the worse, you should examine your Web site. If your site has been pushed back a few places in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Position), say from position seven to position twelve, there is most likely nothing to worry about. Variations such as this are completely normal for the search engines and they can change by the week, day, hour or even the location from which you perform the search.

However, if your SERPs went from position seven to position fifty for a period of time longer than two weeks, then there may be a problem with your site. Technical issues such as coding or settings on your Web site can be the culprit and can most likely be fixed by your in-house Webmaster or your SEO consultant quickly.

A less obvious on-site factor that could push your site back in the SERPs is over-optimization. Assuming that nothing has changed with your competition, or the search engines, and you have recently performed an update to your Web site or the pages that have dropped in rank, the changes could have triggered a search engine filter.

Filters, such as the duplicate content filter, keyword stuffing filter or having a large number of incoming links with the same anchor text, called a Google bomb, are not always easy to identify because there are no set numbers as to what constitutes a violation. For one site, having forty percent duplicate content may have no effect, while forty percent on another site may have the effect of dropping the SERPs back a few pages.

Another reason for your Web site to lose rankings is the activity of your competitors. If your competitor suddenly goes from nonexistent, in the search results, to bumping your site down a notch or two they may have hired an SEO consultant. If the competing Web site has always been near your site in the rankings and just recently has overtaken it, they may have acquired a new partnership with a related Web site or multiple Web sites and receive the benefit of quality, relevant links.

Being mentioned and linked to by a popular news source could also have the effect of bumping a site ahead of the competition. For example, if CNN has a news story that appears on the homepage of their Web site and mentions another site as a source of additional information, that Web site could be on the receiving end of thousands of incoming links as other sources copy the story with the incoming link in tact. Some of these links will be temporary and may only cause a brief stint in the top ten for the Web site. Other links from the news story would be permanent and would have at least some overall benefit.

In any of these cases, a single competitor can only push your Web site one or two positions down in the SERPs. While this is undesirable, the real problems start when multiple competitors employ these tactics and start pushing your site back by pages instead of single digit positions.

Search engines can also wreak havoc on the rankings of your business. In fact, the search engine with the most market share, Google, is known to do this most often. There are three main ways in which Google can affect your ranking: an algorithm update, index update or a data refresh.

The least likely of these to affect your site is the algorithm update. Google’s main algorithm has not been changed for approximately a year and half. Sub algorithms of the main algorithm have changed between now and then but determining what exactly those changes are is nearly impossible given the number of individual factors within the algorithm. Index updates happen all the time. It use to be that Google updated its index once a month, but now the index is in a continual state of change and new sites are added as they are found. Given that there are approximately eight billion pages in Google’s index, it would be completely futile to try and track what pages are added to and dropped from the Google index. That leaves us with the data refresh.

Using a car as an analogy, Google engineer Matt Cutts compares an index update to changing the model of the car, an algorithm update would be akin to changing a part of the car such as the engine and a data refresh would be similar to changing the gas in the car.

A data refresh changes the way the algorithm operates on the data from a Web site. This is the most common type of change and can happen as often as every few days. For example, keywords in the title of the webpage may be of very high benefit but after a data refresh the search engines may rate the title as much less valuable.

The most recent major data refreshes happened on June and July 27th, and affected thousands of Web sites. The easiest way to determine if your Web site has been affected by a data refresh, algorithm update or an index update is to check webmaster forums such as Webmasterworld.com. It is not uncommon to see hundreds of people posting topics asking what has happened to their Web sites within a day or two of major Google activity. Google will sometimes confirm on Webmasterworld.com that there has been a large change such as this.

After you have reviewed the possible causes as to why your Web site no longer appears prominently in the search engines, you can determine what course of action to take. The most effective course of action for all three major issues is to create unique, relevant, quality content that is useful to your users and promote that content through link building. Developing content and promoting it over the web, however, can take time and you may not be willing to lose the revenue normally generated from your previously high rankings for specific keywords.

One way to offset this loss is to allocate additional funds to your pay per click campaign. Increasing the bid amount for the keywords that you no longer show up for in the SERPs can increase the advertising position of your ad and will generally increase the number of targeted clients driven to your site. Increasing the daily spend amount for advertising campaigns also has the potential of increasing the number of targeted clients by allowing your ads to show more often, or over a longer period of time.

By far, the best option is to never have your site drop out of the search engines. Realistically, you need to understand the dynamic nature of the search engines and align your web strategy to fit those constraints.

Building a high quality site, continuously adding unique high quality content and following search engine rules and guidelines are three principles to increase the longevity of your high rankings and a great way to decrease the ‘bounce back’ time should your site fall out of favor. Following those three principles is a perfect start to never having to ask the question, "Wherefore art thou dot com?"