12/19/10

I was looking at my stats today and noticed I had a massive drop in traffic on one of my best sites.

Rankings Drops are Never Fun

As I’m writing this, I’m going through varying degrees of panic….   Even though I KNOW that most of the time rankings come back within a week or two.   This is a little stressful though as this site is over 2 years old.

I did check to make sure the site is still indexed (and it is), and not ALL of my keywords have dropped, just most of them.  This leads me to believe the site will (as most sites do) come back stronger than ever.

My Plan

I am going to pretend as if nothing unusual happened and I am going to follow my normal plan for promoting a site.  The next thing on my list is social bookmarking, so that is what I will do.  I am saving this post as a draft right now, and will let you know when the site comes back to life.

12/20/10

Today my site is still not doing well.  I checked the rankings and MOST were worse than yesterday, but some were better and the site remains indexed, so I am not giving up.   I sent some bookmarking links to the front page today via SocialADR.  I also spend some time talking with one of my IM friends via Skype.  I had a page on the site that I thought might be causing the problems with the ranking (it could be construed as some adult type of terms, even though it is not at all), and she helped me edit it.  Also my outsourcer added a page of content to it.   I also did blog commenting on 4 related blogs today.  Total time about an hour.

12/21/10

For today I submitted 3 new pages to social adr and did 3 blog comments pointing to the first page.   I seeing some more upward movements on the keywords, but I still only had 12 visitors yesterday, when normally I have from 90 to 130 in a day.  I am expecting things to get back to normal in one to two weeks.

12/22/10

I checked my traffic for this site this morning and I am happy to say that it looks like it is coming back.  I already have 11 visitors for the day and it is only 7:30 AM (I had 14 visitors all day yesterday).  I am ranking again for some of my old keywords as well.  We will see what things look like by the end of the day, but I am encouraged to say the least.   I haven’t done any promotion at all on this site yet, but I plan on it…  I’ll let you know.

12/23/10

Well the site is back up and going strong.  I don’t know if I’ll ever know what caused it, but I am happy it is back and doing well.

Lessons Learned:

If your site drops in rankings, but is still indexed don’t freak out.  I did freak out myself, so this lesson is for me as well.  If you MUST do something, build backlinks.  It never hurts.

Here is an excellent article about the subject that really helped me.

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/12/01/what-to-do-when-your-search-rankings-drop/

I’m glad my site is back and making money.

If you have ever experienced this… leave a comment.  I would love to hear from you.

To Your Success!

Heather

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