Are you the type of person who has Google on the mind 24 hours a day? Instead of relaxing and spending quality time with family and friends, you duck into the bathroom with your i-phone “to see if your rankings have slipped” or see if one of your competitors has snuck up on you and planted a banana peel and taken your spot? If this sounds familiar, then chances are that you are obsessed with your rankings.
Don’t obsess over search engine rankings, on the contrary, progress. Optimization is a work in process, any stability achieved is marginal and temporal at best until the new criteria of relevance, supply and demand determine who stays and who gets sent packing.
Who needs reality TV when you have SERP (search engine result page) obsession. There is always a competition brewing, it you look below the facade there are constant bouts being fought for every key phrase between loving competitors, not to mention there is always a winner and constant eliminations to top things off as the emotional clincher to every ranking finale.
Ranking is one thing, if you are in the top 20 for a particular search term then you in the ballpark. You are essentially making a statement to search engines that you want to be considered a resource but losing sleep over it, not eating or unloading on everyone in the office may not be the best way to get your position back. The point is to be leery of obsession over rankings, as they can be an addictive thing.
Once you are in the spotlight in the top 10 for a competitive term and then it takes a hiatus, the first thing that ensues is typically panic and anxiety as you use every method in your grasp to try to figure out what happened.
Well to put it simply, change happened!, you must constantly push the envelope to maintain competitive SEO rankings, relevance demands it, nothing personal, just algorithmic. A simple fact of organic optimization is, rankings come and go, just don’t lose sight of the vision.
Also, keep in mind, not all data centers tell the same story, they all have their own crawl rates so just because Data Center A sees your site at #3 and Data Center B sees your site at #15 (since it has not received the endorsement yet from the mother ship) doesn’t mean that the touted ghost ranking does not exist.
Typically in a week, if you consistently see the same search result, considered it relevant and stable, it doesn’t mean that the competition can’t dethrone you from your spot, but obviously the more Google data centers that share the same information, the better (until authority kicks in).
The bottom line, don’t put your eggs in one basket, develop multiple phrases to revert to if one loses relevance and above all else, keep moving forward.
