Google slaps or why you should diversify

James — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 20:21:42 +0000

Most EBay Partner Network users rely primarily on organic traffic (search engine traffic) through the use of search engine optimization (SEO). Organic traffic is arguably the best type of traffic as it’s free (as in you don’t pay-per-click, but you do pay in time) and users arriving at your site through search engines are often looking for something specific. The drawbacks of organic search is that it generally require patience and time to rank well. As the large majority of users never get past Google’s second page of results, ranking in page one or two for your chosen keywords is highly prized.

One of my niches was doing very well, ranking two or three for my chosen keywords. This has been the way for several months until recently when I noticed a massive drop in traffic. My instinct told me to head to Google and search for my main keyword search – which I don’t even rank for anymore (well at least in the first 22 pages anyway).

So what do you do if (when?) this happens. My frist instinct was to change everything to try and rank again. However, the wisdom of the Internet says you shouldn’t do this. Any many cases, the best thing to do is wait. While this may seem counterintuitive, it’s best to make no major changes to your site for around a month. You should however, continue to add quality content and backlinks as you would normally do.

Over these weeks, take some time to do some SEO research as well as browse forums and other information sources to see what other people are experiencing. Remember, don’t make any major changes, simply use this time as a learning experience. However, SEO tweaks, site redesign and other minor tweaks can be employed to improve your site. If you’re unsure of the affect on your site, rather leave it. Try to document the changes you make, as you may need to reverse these at a later stage.

The next step is to diversify – find other niches, obtain other sources of traffic (PPC for example). Build other sites in other niches, optimise and build more.

If your site hasn’t returned to similar or close to the traffic levels before the Google slap, it may be time to optimise the site layout or recreate the site from scratch with new content or possibly a new domain.

Handy tip: use the search term site:www.yoursitename.com in Google – no results means you’ve been de-indexed (or if your site is relatively new, say less than a month old, has not been indexed by Google yet) and you may need to move your site to a new domain or start from scratch. Results returned means your site is still indexed by Google, which means you have a chance of ranking well again. Another handy tip – the site:www.yoursitename.com command shows the number of pages in the Google index. Try site:www.yoursitename.com -inallurl:www.yoursitename.com and compare this to the earlier result. The second command shows the number of pages in the Google main index and supplemental index, the second the number of pages in the Google main index. Your objective is to have as many pages in the main Google index, as pages in the supplemental index are not included in Google search results.

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Google slaps or why you should diversify