In SEO, Crawlability Still Trumps Most Other Issues

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Webmasters complain about their rankings, whenever they notice unexpected changes. It’s completely understandable from a human nature standpoint. Who the hell wants to lose something they perceive they’ve had to work hard to achieve? So when you sense your rankings slipping, you tend to get emotional. This is not the time to let those emotions gain control of your good sense.

Make sure search engine spiders can crawl your pages before pressing the panic button

Before you panic about Google penalties or any such thing, check your website’s crawlability. If the spiders can crawl, and are crawling your content pages with no impediment, you are still in the game. If you find obvious template or webmaster errors, fix them. Get the spiders back in, and your troubles should disappear.

If crawlability is perfect, check your outgoing links and on-page optimization, including your meta tags. Double check all of the obvious areas that could cause problems. Remain calm and don’t attempt to postulate a theory when you have so little information. If you still see you have no problems, then consider off-page factors like linkage. If you suspect everything is clean, you need to just exercise patience and continue on with your daily work.

After watching Google relatively closely for the last five years, it’s safe for me to say that sometimes Google doesn’t work exactly as expected. There are definite periods when their index seems to glitch as it relates to my pages. It’s frustrating to watch, but over time the troubles seem to evaporate. Remaining calm really seems to help the situation.

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