There’s No Point Waiting To Tweak Pages After A Fall In Rankings
December 4, 2006 – 7:59 amIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
When you fall in your search engine rankings, common wisdom will tell you to be patient. I’m not so sure this is great advice. You can’t just assume everything is perfect. You need to begin examine what could be the cause of your fall, or complacence might just get the better of you. You can be patience, once you’ve checked your website for issues.
The first issue you can look for is to see if both your www. and your non-www traffic resolve to the same address. If they don’t, you need to make sure that they do, and you need to inform Google. You can do this with a 301 .htaccess redirect. Once you set it, I also suggest you set the Google Preferred Domain using the Google Sitemaps program. That way, Google will find out quickly which domain you really mean.
You can also submit a Google Sitemap. It’s pretty easy to do, and now MSN and Yahoo also support the Sitemap XML format. That could be a quick way to fix any woes you have.
Also, look for any broken links. If you have a CMS, the number of URL problems can be compounded, posing a real problem for search engine spiders. Make sure that you don’t have duplicate URLs referring to the same files. If you do, eliminate them at once.
Lastly, once you check your website, you can check the off-page factors that may have changed your fortunes. If you recently lost an important backlink, this could quickly spell gloom for you search engine efforts. It’s always a good idea to try and land some good backlinks after any search engine drop.
The bottom line is, pay careful attention to what’s going on. Double check all of the obvious things. Continue to add content and links, and most of all remain upbeat. It’s very easy to get depressed about a rankings drop, and it’s pointless to read too much into it. Google doesn’t hate you. They don’t care that you exist 
Just keep working and you can get back the rankings. Never give up and keep on working.
What do you do if you experience a drop?
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6 Responses to “There’s No Point Waiting To Tweak Pages After A Fall In Rankings”
Hi Darren.
This is a suggestion that I believe would help we newbs.
Your articles, tips, etc. are short on “How-to” information. Maybe you can include links to tutorials in your articles so we can get the “How-to” information and implement your suggestions.
Thanks.
By Jim on Dec 4, 2006
Great article. Im going to submit a sitemap for my site to see how it goes.
By Ed on Dec 4, 2006
Jim,
I’ll write some of these up in the next few weeks, since you asked. It’s tough to guess the level of expertise of everyone reading, so the feedbacks help.
I’ll introduce a few of the keys that really need covering.
By Darren McLaughlin on Dec 4, 2006
Greetings Darren!
Nice article! Short, clear and informative. As for your advices, I already submitted a sitemap to google for my website (which is good).
But can you further explain on the http://www. prefix on the site compared to no http://www. prefix? I mean, whats the difference? I’m not quite clear with that one.
By Wilford on Dec 15, 2006
Hello Wilford,
Thanks for reading and commenting.
Here’s the article where I explain about the 301 issue in Google.
If you have the sitemaps set up already, just set the preferred domain to http://www.
There’s instructions on how to do it in that post.
Darren
By Darren McLaughlin on Dec 15, 2006