Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about ranking your pages in the highest possible position in the search engine result pages.
Do Your Pages Suffer from the Search Engine Shuffle?
The great thing about search engine positioning is, a higher position (from multiple keywords) translates into enhanced exposure and free organic traffic for your website.
Since most people do not go past the first page of the SERPs (search engine result pages) when looking for products or services; where you rank can determine if you only receive a few measly visits or if you have to hire a new staff to process the barrage of fresh leads and increased sales volume.
The volume of traffic filtering through your sales funnel directly impacts the bottom line, but what if search engines change the algorithm or your pages take a dip without warning.
Google has a propensity to show different results over the weekend for key search terms? We have internally dubbed this “the weekend index” where “we speculate, since really Google only knows” that all the servers and data centers take a chance to go off the grid, put up a cached version of the SERPs and swap notes on which websites have been naughty or nice.
Essentially, this is when the new list of sites are algorithmically assessed and the new relevance score (for that week) is rolled out by comparing apples to apples and new entries (websites and pages) to seasoned authority sites for their respective optimized keywords.
Usually on Monday morning (early in the am) it is almost as if someone flips the switch and the index as well know it returns with an array of tweaks that either leave some webmasters scratching their heads and others rejoicing and the SERP shakedown leave a trail of new rankings in its wake.
Almost as if the crawlers are having a stint of amnesia, from time to time, some sites slip through the cracks (if the data centers have an anomaly in crawl data).
Even though there are many ways to insulate your website from taking a hiatus or a dip, it is always a moving target to determine which metrics are the flavor of the week (so to speak) for organic search.
Here is our suggested reading list to counteract fluctuations in the SERPs or insulate your website from minor algorithmic anomalies.
- SEO has Its Ups and Downs
- Managing Link Weight and Building Link Insurance
- SEO Defense – Why Defending Your Position is Necessary
- Search Trends and Fluctuations in the SERPs
- Did Google Rebuild Its Index Right Under Our Nose?
- SEO Dependency – Balancing Your Home Page and Rankings
We hope you enjoyed reading our collection of SEO tips, tactics and techniques from the SEO Design Solutions Blog.
