SEO First Aid: What to Do When The Rankings Crash
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Alrighty. So everyone has had this experience. You go into your respective rank checking program, scan over the scores of keywords, and realize one thing: They’re down…Way down. So what do you do? Your actions here can determine the next 6 months or more of the site.
XMCP’s Commandments Of SEO First Aid
- Do Not Overreact - Almost every time this happens, a persons impulse is to spring into action, and fix it. This is not a good plan. Google’s algorithm is incredibly good at detecting sudden changes in a site, and rarely looks at them favorably.
- Wait a Few Days - The Google algo is a strange beast indeed, and sometimes a new site will bounce around the rankings like crazy for a bit. Chill out for a bit, and see what happens.
- Examine Your Backlinks - Yahoo generally maintains a list of backlinks even after the page is gone. For a while at least. Go into those, and start checking. Are the pages you were on disappear? Did the site owner botch an architecture change? Can you see any eviidence of naughty SEO practices on their page that might’ve caused the loss of their ability to pass Pagerank?
- Check Who’s Ranking Instead Of You - Are they new competitors, or ones that have been around for awhile? If they’re new competitors, you might have just been out SEO-ed.
- Check Google’s Webmaster Tools - See if there’s been any crawling errors. Maybe a host updated something that caused the dive. I can recall oe experience where I got switched from a Windows(non case-sensitive) box to a BSD box(case sensitive) so my site was spitting out 404s all over the place. Note: This is whitehats only. Blackhats, stay the hell away from webmaster tools
- Maintain Your Link Velocity - Keep building links, but do nothing extraordinary. You might want to pull the best tricks out of your bag for this one. Get them quality, but keep the quantity standard for your site and niche. You don’t want to set off any more red flags.
- Do Minor Internal Tweaks - Consider basic SEO elements(no-following Privacy Policies and such), but keep it contained. You don’t want to do anything drastic like 301ing an entire set of articles to the homepage or anything.
- Examine Your Other Sites - Most people that I know have certain places they go for backlinks repeatedly. Check sites that share similar backlinks to the one that took the dive, and see if they took a similar dive.
- Examine Which Keywords Dropped - This is tricky, as more competitive keywords will naturally dip harder than easier ones. But by relating your damaged keywords to the sites that gave you that anchor text, you can sometimes trace it back to the source of a problem.
- Create Some Fresh Content - A lot of rankings are based largely off of fresh content that appeared on the site. They disappear with time. Introduce a few new pages tightly targeted to your keyterms, press Publish, and hope for the best. Do not create too many new pages though.
- Realize The Rankings May Not Come Back - Make a few sites that concentrate on the easier keywords your rank dipped for. Not only will it take your mind off the impending doom of the damaged site, but if you promote them properly, they may take your old rank. Highly targeted sites to few keywords can rank more easily than a beast in many cases. You can use these sites to direct traffic back to your main site(in case the rankings don’t return), or use them to serve as a fresh, powerful inbound link to your site in an effort to restore it’s former grace. Use different whois/IPs/Class-C IPs for this.
Best of Luck To All
-XMCP
January 30th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
It’s incredible how you come up with these high-quality posts day after day. Thumbs up!
January 30th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
Good post with some great advice. I always bear in mind that pagerank is just a theoretical value and it’s the quantity and quality of traffic that counts. It’s good practice to check your traffic stats to see if there has been a marked decrease in visitors.
January 30th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
This is cool.
Also, tracing back what you did in last 1 month and trying to reverse / test them 1 by 1 has worked for us.
Reason is that we do so little for SEO anyway
Rajat
January 30th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
@Adam: Thank you very much!
@Caravan: Yup, I agree. I’m talking about ranking loss in this entry, not pagerank. When I say “lose the ability to pass pagerank”, think of it as link juice instead ;). Should of wrote it that way.
@Rajat: Cool to hear it worked for ya!
January 30th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Awesome post, X
Number 2 is the most difficult. Not for me, but explaining to a client. Nobody wants to hear that we have to wait while they lose money. Eh…such is SEO.
January 30th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
I agree with you 100%.
I hate to pimp our own website, but you might be interested in our post on google hates us.
-OT
January 31st, 2008 at 4:46 am
Another great one. I am bookmarking it for distribution in our company when it becomes relevant. And it will… :)))
Dude you totally rock!
January 31st, 2008 at 11:19 am
Good advice. I think a lot of it boils down to the same thing I also realized back when I was an IT manager: don’t start fixing things until you know what’s broken.
January 31st, 2008 at 11:50 pm
Your reaction depends on whether you know what the problem is. I had a ranking, cut some content to add a form above the fold. Zing, i’m out of the top 100.
Put back some new content and more copy-ish, to see if it can get the ranking back and generate some leads. we’ll see.
February 1st, 2008 at 6:27 am
[…] viemehr die eigene Seite und die der Mitbewerber genau untersuchen. XMCP gibt auf seiner Seite elf Tipps zur Ersten Hife, an welchen Stellen man eventuell nachbessern kann und worauf man ein Auge haben […]
February 1st, 2008 at 7:00 am
Thank you very much for this eleven crash commandments
Best of all: keep quiet!
February 1st, 2008 at 1:26 pm
[…] probably younger than you: Anchor text shuffler for your link bombing box. A non-shady post on what to do if your rankings crash. And finally for you wanna be black belts: Basics of content generation and your 1st blackhat […]
February 3rd, 2008 at 12:47 pm
[…] Hilfe beim Ranking Crash
February 4th, 2008 at 9:12 am
@Pete: Genius mate, everyone forgets that, you can’t fix something if you don’t know whats wrong!
May 9th, 2008 at 4:53 am
We found this week that one of our sites had completely fallen from Google’s ranking (from 5,000 plus unique searches per day down to 25-50!). We went and checked everything we’d done in the past month and it found it was partly due to the removal of some links from other sites we operate, but mainly due to a PageRank penalty which Google had just picked up on a stalish set of pages that were linking in: they had been hacked and were full of spam links - thanks to the shared web host over there not informing us of a huge security breach. Hugely painful.
May 23rd, 2008 at 1:26 pm
I started a blog 2yrs ago to learn how to blog, use adsense, etc and it was going well. 2days ago, I crossed over 1000 visitors/day. Big deal for me as the site was generating over $100/day. Again, big for me since I dont really know what I’m doing.
All of a sudden this morning, my site is out of the search results. I have no idea what happened. I did notice that some sites started using my blogger feeds maybe creating duplicate content?
I wish there were a way to get feedback from google or someone who works for google to determine what happened here. Maybe that doesnt make any sense though.
I just wish I knew if I was seo’d out, or maybe my compeitors downranked me somehow, or what the heck happened.