Hold Tight! What To Do When Your Search Engine Rankings Fluctuate

• Are Your Organic Search Engine Rankings Dancing Around? •
• Has Your Site Suddenly Dropped Way Down In The SERPs? •

If you haven’t been fiddling around changing your pages, nor have you been trying out anything “black-hat” that could be considered SEO spam tactics … hold on! Take a deep breath and read up.

Here’s the scenario: you’ve been toiling away, adding quality content which is keyword optimized to your site; you’re not obsessively tweaking or messing with the existing content.

You decide to check up on some of your keyword phrases to see how you rank and OH-OH! The great ranking positions you were previously holding, or the ones that you were watching slowly rising up in their SERP positions are now WORSE than before.

What to do? What’s going on? For the new internet marketer, nothing short of panic normally sets in.

But … don’t get panicky! Fluctuation in organic search engine rankings is a GIVEN … hear me? It is going to happen and there is nothing you or I can do about it. It’s that old algorithm-thing happening.

When your search engine rankings fluctuate, or even if your site drops from the rankings, hold tight. Understand that these things happen in this industry, and they WILL happen to you. I can assure you they absolutely happen to me!

What Not To Do …

Please do NOT start fiddling and tweaking and making all sorts of changes to your pages. Don’t touch the content or the Title tag or META tags. OK? Trust me please.

What will most likely happen is that your pages will very shortly reappear right back where they were before. In some cases, they might hold a little lower ranking.  Or your rankings might even rank HIGHER than before.  As a matter of fact, this just happened to me the other day, and now I am #1 and #2 for a position I used to be #3 for. (Yoo-Hoo!)

Anyway, it’s way too common for site owners to PANIC in the short term, when it would be 100% wiser to just take it easy and ride the wave.

However, if you DID do something spammy or “black-hat” … or you were changing Title tags, or stuffing in more keywords, etc. … then you’d better STOP and take a good long look at the harm you’ve just inflicted upon your site.  Go back and make things right!  And please … learn a good SEO rankings lesson  from the mess you’ve just caused! 

For the rest of us, remember … take a deep breath and hang tight! (There-there, I promise it will be OK!)