May-June 2009 SERP Shakeups – Here We Go Again

Have you guys checked your SERP positions lately? There are definitely some shake ups going on with Google and their algo.

A couple of my good aged site’s home pages just plummeted in the SERPS. One site, while it still ranks for other keywords, was pushed back to the black hole for a keyword that it has ranked for for over 1 1/2 years and the keyword is very low competition and now there is a whole lot of junk sitting on page 1 for that keyword.

And the same with other SERP results that are also showing a lot of crappy and spammy sites, as well as irrelevant sites.

Now in doing some reading around the web this seems to be an on going issue for many in the last couple of weeks with even aged authority sites losing major rank and sites dropping several pages in the SERPS. Coincidentally a very similar thing happened in June of 2008.

There also seems to be a pattern with index pages (home pages) losing rank while inner pages remain solid across the SERPS.

Now, while there will always be fluctuations in the SERPS , this seems to be something bigger and on a larger scale and similar shifts happen several times throughout the year.

Some guess that Google is trying out a new filter to catch paid links, and others think that the filter is negating blog comment links. I doubt the latter because my sites that lost rank have very few blog comments as backlinks.

Google just announced that they added external resource loading capabilities capabilities for Flash and indexing of flash, this may also be a part of this, learn more at Google Webmasters Blog post on this.

Really it could be anything. As that famous saying from The Godfather goes, “this is the business we’ve chosen” and dealing with Google SEO is always a roller coaster rider

I am not sure how major this one is, but I, as well as others do not think (at least I hope not) that this will last, most likely things will calm down and the SERPS will return to normalcy.

The most important thing to remember: DO NOT PANIC!

One of the biggest mistakes that webmasters make when their sites see a significant drop in SERP rank is to start making drastic changes on their sites.

1. This is often a mistake because it can trigger alarms and filters such that when the SERPS do return to some normalcy your changes may have adverse effects for your original rank positions.

2. The traffic is all that really matters. Another factor to consider is look at your traffic patterns, usually losing SERP positions for a couple of pages or even the home page will not affect traffic that much because most sites come up for lots of keyword searches, especially the long tails from inner pages.

This is where Google Analytics really comes in handy for analyzing those SERP patterns affects on your sites.

3. Remember to have faith in your work and if you are not doing anything extreme or super black hat then do not worry, just keep on working as usual, add some content to your sites, that is always a solid and safe route to take.

4. And also remember that this is probably not personal but a web wide change.

…Best thing to do in these types of situations is to wait it out.

If you go over to this thread in Webmaster World you will see a very interesting discussion on this topic with lots of webmasters sharing their experiences with this shift.

Have you guys noticed the SERP changes? Anyone lost major rankings?

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