SolveYourProblem
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Series
Recover from a Search Engine Ranking Tumble
As the search engines continue to improve,
your SEO needs to as well. A ranking tumble for your website
can be devastating. You need to recover as soon as possible
– it’s not the easiest task in the world, but it’s not as
hard as you’d think. The most important thing to
keep in mind is that you cannot panic. You have to keep working on
your SEO projects and you need to remember that listings
and rankings come and go spiratically at times but that search
engines won't let you down if your site is useful.
The
experts’ advice to websites that have lost their ranking
is usually to start over, following current and good SEO
information. Look over your entire site and insure that you
haven't done something that would have caused this sudden
change in listings and rankings. Normally if you haven't
done anything wrong, your links will slowly begin to reappear
again especially if you have a nice sized linking network
that is listed well.
One
step that you can take is to narrow your site’s focus and work hard on one or two keywords. It doesn’t seem like
a lot, but it’s sufficient. Make sure each page of your site
includes good enough navigation that someone can get anywhere
from anywhere else, and make sure you do this with plain
‘a href’ links, not fancy JavaScript.
If
you are using frames, now is a good time to dump them. You can replace them with scrollable <div> tags
and have similar looking pages that search engines can
index
more easily. The most important concept in recovering from
a ranking tumble is to perform damage control. Any SEO operation
that you have performed that could be deemed as controversial
you should immediately disband. If you are lucky, your web
site hasn't been permanently deleted from any important search
engines.
Once you have performed all of the local damage control
that you can it is a good idea to insure that your
file sizes are relatively small. Make sure that you don't have any excessive
images or large external files that will cause a search engine
to give up on its attempt to index you. Make sure that you
haven't created a linking loop that Google's bots can't find
a way out of.
Links
are very important to your website’s rankings, and
you need to consider finding good link partners to improve
your targeted traffic and keyword relevancy. If you have
a decent corp of link partners already you can request that
they move their links to your site to a higher traffic page
for a short period of time so that you can get re-indexed.
They may be willing to do this if you remind them that the
links from your site to theirs are more valuable once you've
been indexed than they are when you are unindexed.
If you submit to the search engines properly the first time
and you have a good SEO maintenance plan, you’ll only need
to submit your site once. You might consider hiring someone
to keep your site regularly updated, as regularly-updated
sites rank higher. If you have recently suffered a ranking
tumble, use Google Sitemaps to get your page back into Google.
This is the fastest method available and is the strongest
damage control that you will be able to perform.
Build
great content around your keywords or phrases. Remember
that content is King for both visitors and search engines.
Your content must be extremely relevant to your key words
at this point. You don’t want to try to pull a fast one because
this was probably the reason that your ranking tumbled in
the first place. Remember: When you are recovering from a
rank tumble, you are at the search engines’ mercy. You cannot
possibly recover if you try to do anything that doesn’t seem
right to the search engines.
Submit
your website properly to each search engine and directory
by hand, making sure you understand each site’s rules. Using
automatic submissions is just not a good idea. There are
so many things that can go wrong and you just don’t know
what goes on behind the scenes. Work by hand and if possible,
contact the search engine or directory and ask them if there
is a specific reason that your site was suddenly removed.
Ask them if there is any action that you can take to make
up for any mistakes that you may have made.
Get
as many one-way links as you can from directories or
pay to have good websites link to yours. One-way links are
better than two-way ones.
Monitor your results regularly to find out what’s working
and what’s not. Don’t be afraid to make changes.
Keep all these things in mind and you can recover from a
rankings tumble easily.
