Anyone who has worked in the SEO world for more than a couple of years knows that SEO is a constantly evolving game. When search engines make a significant change to their algorithm, websites inevitably do a crazy game of musical chairs and there is always a shuffle in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s).
When this happens, websites that had achieved top rankings may drop overnight, new sites may assume the leadership role and other sites may be de-indexed completely. The SEO is stuck trying to figure out how to regain those rankings, and construe the nature of the changes and why their sites were affected.
For this reason, a reputable SEO firm will build their client’s rankings through a variety of techniques and create a broad web presence for their clients. Having a diverse link profile, social profile, and overall trustworthy web presence that utilizes all of the available online resources will help protect the website from being “penalized” when the search engines make an update.
SEO Ranking Factors Can Change With the Wind
SEO Professionals worldwide all remember the “Florida Update” that Google made to it’s algorithm back in 2003. This was an important update because many sites dropped overnight in the SERP’s, or lost their rankings altogether.
Again, in late 2007, Google removed a line from their webmaster guidelines that recommended listing your site in directories. Shortly thereafter, many sites who had gained their rankings through ONLY directory links were dropped far down the SERP’s. Or de-indexed altogether.
As recently as December of 2010, Google publicly updated their rankings algorithm in response to an article from the New York Times outlining how an unethical merchant used Negative reviews to increase his visibility in Google search results. This adjustment is meant to take into account negative sentiment and negative reviews, and apply them to the results accordingly.
In February of 2011, Google’s “Panda Update” was made to penalize low quality sites that are composed of duplicate content. Overnight, many sites that were using scraped or aggregated content, like eHow, were dropped out of the top spots for thousands of keywords.
With all of these constant changes, your SEO firm needs to be on the ball.
How Does an SEO Firm Manage These Constant Changes?
A quality SEO company will stay up to date on the current trends, explore and constantly test these factors to determine which factors are the most important at the time, and exploit those factors as the changes come.
An SEO firm that is ahead of the game will know about these changes as they are coming, and will know immediately when they have been implemented. In preparation for unexpected changes, a quality SEO firm will create a well balanced, diversified web presence for their clients. They will ensure that their clients are listed in all of the relevant areas that are affecting the SERP’s today, and they will also ensure that their clients appear in those areas that may become important in the future.
If your SEO team is doing their job correctly, your site will not be as vulnerable to the changes in the Search Engine algorithms, you will be able to maintain your top rankings when a change is made, and your long term SEO strategy will succeed.
If you need help with your SEO campaign, or you need to figure out what’s going on with your campaign after the recent changes made by Google, contact us today
Call 800-420-5770