Any business who has a decent web presence will go through this from time to time. Let’s say you’re cruising along and writing good content, acquiring some high quality inbound links, and working on your social media campaign and then all of a sudden you wake up one morning and check your rankings for a major term. Uh OH! you’re nowhere to be found. Hell, your rankings haven’t only fell out of the bottom of the index, your landing page for that term has been de-indexed.
What do you do? What can you do? There are all sorts of things to check. Are some of your inbound links from crappy sites? Are you going a little overboard with your keyword frequency and density (not that it matters much these days)? Maybe Google just decided that your page looked a little suspect. There are a million things that could have happened. So back to the original question…. what do you do?
Nothing! Sometimes it’s absolutely best to do nothing. Especially if you know that you’ve done nothing shady. All you can do is sit and wait out the storm. It could be that Google is going through an algo change and everything will work itself out in a few days. I’ve gone through the same thing with Dept. of Search and had to wait for a couple weeks to see how things will play out. At the end of the wait, my rankings for a targeted keyword returned and had actually improved.
My next post might include something like…. “OK, my rankings have dropped and I probably did something to cause it….”
