It’s been a strange few months to be responsible for a site’s rankings. Since Penguin landed in April there’s been a run of smaller data refreshes and general turbulence, and every one of them sends a fresh wave of people to the forums convinced they’ve been hit again. Keeping a level head through it is most of the job right now.
The mistake I keep watching people make is reacting to every wobble. A ranking slips three places over a weekend and someone rips out a chunk of content, rewires the internal linking, and files a reconsideration request, all at once, in a panic. Then things move again the following week and they’ve no idea which of the four things they did mattered, or whether any of it did.
What I’d do instead through a spell like this:
- Change one thing at a time and give it a fortnight before you judge it. Google isn’t recalculating your fate hourly, whatever the rank trackers imply.
- Keep a dated log of every change you make to the site. When rankings move you’ll want to know what you’d altered and when. Memory is useless for this; write it down as you go.
- Separate a real drop from noise. A two-place wobble on one keyword is just background movement; a ten-place fall across a whole cluster of terms, holding for a week, is something worth acting on.
August is slack enough that I’ve been using it to do the link audit properly on a couple of sites, rather than in a Penguin panic. Pulling the full profile, going through it calmly, marking the dubious links and starting removals before anything is on fire. It’s a far better frame of mind to do the work in than “we’ve been hit, fix it by Friday”, even though the actual job on the screen is exactly the same one.
I don’t want to give the impression I’ve got this beaten, because I haven’t. Some of the sites I look after have recovered ground over the summer and I can’t fully explain why, which is a slightly awkward thing to admit when someone is paying you to know. What I can say is that the calm sites, the ones whose owners resisted the urge to thrash about, have generally come through this better than the ones who panicked.
