Google has always been updating their search algorithm to provide their users with the best and most relevant search results. A digital marketing campaign should never be set in stone so that you have the flexibility to adjust your strategy when these updates happen. Recently, new updates on the Google algorithm has been coming in quite fast and many websites are dancing the “Google dance” moving up and down over the last few weeks.
If you had a sudden drop in traffic to any of your websites, do you know how to fix it?
Website analytics
If your website has suffered with rankings in the last couple of weeks and you don’t know which update affected your precious rankings, don’t fear. If you have Google Analytics or any other analytics software tracking your website traffic, have a close look at dates to determine specific spikes and declines in traffic. If your rankings has suddenly dropped or increased at a specific period in time, it may be due to search engine algorithm update. Don’t just check overall traffic, but look at specific traffic generated from search engines.
You don’t like spam? I think the spammers don’t like it either. What about spam on your website? Have you ever, even in the beginning of optimizing your website built a few dodgy links to your site? Have you ever paid for links? Do you have duplicate content on your website or blog? By duplicate content I mean do you have the same content on your website with multiple URL’s or copied content directly from other websites?
Google’s Quality Guidelines
Whether your website has been hit by the Panda or recent Penguin update, focus and make sure you adhere to the Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to make sure your website won’t get affected to these updates. If you have been affected by these updates, fix and cleanup your website, and with luck, your website will appear in its original position of the search engine result pages (SERP’s).
Don’t get the wrong idea, Google is really not against SEO (Search Engine Optimization), just don’t over optimize your website or fall prey to nasty “Black Hat SEO” methods. These “Black Hat” methods might get you instant results, but will punish you in the long run.
