When you work in the SEO game you soon learn that what goes up in the SERPS must come down. I am now facing that very scenario where a site I’ve been working on climbed from zero SERP to 11th but now its 29th. Its decline was not gradual either its just suddenly dropped over a cliff edge but how can you begin to diagnose why this should happen?
Yes I have google analytics + webmaster tools and need to know if there is anything that could popint towards the demotion.
What I’m hopping to formulate is perhaps an Emergency response plan, a kind of first aid response to what to do when your google rank mysteriously sinks and to deal with irate clients
Don’t panic. This happens all the time because the search engines are constantly adjusting. You have to explain to clients that the results are based on an average and they tend to bounce around from time to time because of the influx of new information being placed on the web.
OK Ive learnt that if your rankings suddenly plummet make your first port of call Google webmaster tools, here is how it helped me.
When I can back from my holiday I naturally checked my clients rankings all was good except one. The clients site ranking for specific key phrases had gone of the end of a cliff from page 1 position 3 to nothing
I then looked inside site config sub category crawler access and there it was a god damn robot txt file had been inserted blocking all indexing:
# Disallows all robots
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Needless to say its getting removed and no Ive no idea how it got there and no one else does either
But use webmaster tools if your rankings suddenly go off the end of a cliff it might just point out why
Well following the fixes I got a big promotion in Google for key oharse steek suppliers followed by a big demotion
How can this be? Now I’m tackling the zillions of crawl errors:
The site in question is http://www.barrettsteel.com/ I’m optimising the site for Steel suppliers but they go up and down in the serps faster than a rollercoaster.
My strategy now is to iron out all the crawl errors but they were there before so God Knows or should i say Google knows why my Serps are so volatile…
What’s the competition doing? Are you still seeing the same pages around yours? Have they also changed or are their rankings fairly stable? Who were the competing pages six months ago compared to now?
A quick look at your site shows that you have IBLs from only 16 unique domains, might be worth getting a few more backlinks
Thanks JJ + Them. Ive subscribed to Wordtrackers back link service & so far very impressed, reveals just how aggressive some competitors are in link building and in what sectors eg Blogs, forums etc.
I haven’t used that for years, it breaks down your competitors IBLs into different sectors/types now? That could be handy, might have another look at WT, I usually listen to Ken McGiffin’s webinars, he knows his stuff alright.
I wouldn’t worry too much about it. I’ve had sites that went from rank 6 to 55 in just one night. Almost gave me a heart attack. But continue your SEO efforts and your site will go back up again. What I do is I submit software to download sites, usually game software. I use PAD submit worker as it only takes less than an hour to submit to almost 400 sites. So far, I haven’t had any problems with google with blasting links since approval from download sites come gradually, like in a span of a week. But my sites’ rankings usually go way back up before then.
