Why do your search rankings change?

One of the most frequently asked questions in SEO forums is a variation on the question, “Why did I lose my search engine rankings?” A few days ago, Darren McLaughlin of Sootle Web took a look at the question. He says there is no point waiting to tweak pages after a fall in rankings.

He opens his post with:

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….

And for the most part I agree with that advice.

But the timing of many requests for help in understanding ranking drops is also important. An experienced SEO should recognize immediately that something is going on if the forums quickly load up with requests for help. That is usually a sign that a search engine update has rolled out. In fact, that is the number one reason for why I still browse so many SEO forums, even though I never participate in them. The SEO forum community is a far more accurate weather gauge than my own extensive network.

I tell people there are four classes of actions that affect your search rankings:

1. What you do with your site
2. What other people do with their sites
3. What the search engines do
4. What people search for

We as Webmasters only have control over one of the classes.

That puts us all at a great disadvantage, so much of search engine optimization is really very limited in its inherent effectiveness. You must combine your optimization efforts with other marketing efforts to ensure that you achieve and maintain high visibility, strong branding, and good traffic.

Good research helps you stay on top of what you need to be doing with your site. Changes in technology may require some changes on your site, but that would be rare. Most often, if you need to fix something it’s because you (or your hosting ISP) broke it. Maybe you’ve been vandalized, but if you can find nothing wrong according to Darren’s checklist, then maybe your drop in ranking is due to another class of factors.

So maybe your competition revised their Web site and created enough of a buzz to generate a lot of inbound linkage. That happens. But you can often recover from being outlinked, especially if you have good content. You may be able to do it by tightening up your on-page optimization, or you may only need to remind people that you still have great resources for specific needs. Or maybe it’s time for you to revise and expand.

Maybe the search engine changed its algorithm. Search engines change ranking criteria all the time. They may add filters, change the way they value links, add new components that require them to split databases, change the settings for valuing on-page factors, etc. Figuring out what may have changed is extremely difficult for two reasons: 1) every idiot in the SEO community is going to be spreading conspiracy theories and hare-brained ideas as soon as they lose rankings; 2) even experienced SEO professionals find it difficult to refrain from analyzing an update before it’s finished.

Typically, a search engine will recrawl the Web after tinkering under the hood. They crawl the Web constantly, but significant updates need to taken throuh a “shakeout crawl” so the services can be sure the engines will function normally. Once the new data refresh is complete, the search engineers make a final review of the product change and then they move on to other tasks.

Because of the recrawl process, whenever the collective screaming of the SEO community indicates a major update is underway, one should assume there will be frequent early claims of “It’s over”. It ain’t over until the data refresh settles down. And not surprisingly, many people find they recover their rankings after the data refresh is finished.

Finally, people stop searching with the old keywords and start searching with new keywords. Query analysis is the least understood, least performed function of search engine optimization today. Many SEOs do some query analysis when they perform their initial keyword research, but you cannot stop analyzing queries. Query patterns change on average about every six months.

There are, of course, seasonal queries and queries about specific people and places. Such queries are driven more by news, promotional campaigns, and educational curricula. Events such as movie releases, television shows, etc. also drive many queries. To maintain effective search engine optimization you must practice good query analysis, and that means watching the queries as the months roll by.

One of the most common mistakes still made in SEO today is optimizing for the wrong keywords. While any adequate SEO who does proper keyword research at the start of a campaign can point out changes that need to be made in strategic targeting, those changes may become outdated in six months to two years.

Every year I change title tags, content, and link anchor text on important pages in my network to adjust to changing query patterns. It’s not that I lose high rankings for targeted keywords. It’s just that people stop looking for those keywords. They find new queries to use. Maybe each year brings a new influx of people searching for the same content people wanted last year, but they just don’t use the same words. Maybe people are tired of seeing the same content and they want to see something different.

The real issue is thus more complex than whether you have lost rankings. You need to understand if you have lost traffic, conversions, visibility, and position in your market. Just watching your rankings in the search engines isn’t sufficient. It never has been. It never will be.