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08.26.09 How To Deal With Daily SEO Algorithm Changes  By
Stoney deGeyter Many small businesses owners keep a more watchful eye on their search engine rankings than a Trekker keeping up with the timeline changes in the Star Trek universe. Search engine rankings can change for one out of several hundred reasons. Your site may gain or lose rankings on a daily bases due to algorithm changes, a dropped or added link, or a site is added or removed from the search engine's index. Some ranking changes can be traced to a particular event while others occur for what seems like no particular reason. In essence, rankings change because change happens. But understanding what causes typical loss of rankings can give us a better insight into sea of search engine ranking fluctuations. This insight can help you prevent serious long-term effects caused by a sudden drop in search engine rankings. While we can never prevent all losses of search engine rankings, understanding the reasons why changes occur can, at least, help you make your presence in search results more stable. Reasons for ranking changes can be boiled down to three basic events: 1) Your site changes, 2) a competitor's site change, or 3) the search engine algorithm changes. Or it could be any combination of the three. Let's look at each individually. (How to) Deal With Changes Made to Your Website On site changes.To keep current most businesses must make frequent changes to their websites. This could be a matter of adding new products, removing old products, changing pricing, publishing a blog post, removing out-dated information, adding current information or even something as significant as a total site re-design. While minor maintenance edits are necessary to make your site better for your visitors, if improperly executed they can have a severely negative effect on your rankings. In most cases small, routine changes will have a minimal effect whatsoever. You'll likely see minor fluctuations in your search engine rankings depending on what was changed and on which page.
But in some cases, even small changes can have a profound impact. When it comes to keyword, or other more significant site changes, you need to proceed carefully and consider the impact any of your planned changes may have. Things such as changing title tags, re-writing content, moving or deleting pages, full site re-designs, or site architecture changes can really screw with your rankings if care is not taken. (How to) Deal With It: Don't make drastic site changes unless its absolutely warranted. And if you do, be sure to consult with an SEO. Big site changes don't have to hurt as bad as they often do. Your SEO can help you ensure the process is as easy on your rankings as possible. When making smaller changes, be sure your changes carefully consider your rankings and optimization efforts already in place. Don't make changes you are unsure about how it will affect the engines without consulting someone who knows. Incoming link changes. Technically, inbound link changes are changes made to other people's website, but it directly changes your site's profile so I'll include it here. Unfortunately, unlike changes made to your website, you don't have direct control over your incoming backlink structure, but that's not to say that you can't have some indirect control over them. If you've done a good job earning natural links then drastic changes in your backlink profile are rare. More typically, however, your backlink profiles can change significantly when large numbers of paid or bartered links suddenly appear or disappear. A sudden influx of new links can help out your rankings tremendously. However if those links are determined by the engines to be "paid," or if you lose those links because you do stop paying for them, then this can lead to significant ranking drops. Even worse such a sudden change in your link profile may flag your site for further examination and/or filtering in the search results. Continue reading this article. About the Author: Stoney deGeyter is president of Pole Position Marketing (www.PolePositionMarketing.com), a search engine optimization / marketing firm providing SEO and website marketing services since 1998. Stoney is also a part-time instructor at Truckee Meadows Community College, as well as a moderator in the Small Business Ideas Forum. He is the author of his E-Marketing Performance eBook and contributes daily to the E-Marketing Performance (www.eMarketingPerformance.com) marketing blog. |
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