Ranking Fluctuations

The fact that life is full of ups and downs is something that we accept, and its not any different when it comes to your site’s rankings?
Fluctuations in your page’s position in search result pages are something that you should come to expect and some times impossible to avoid for several reasons:

• Google releases algorithm updates quite regularly – While not all updates are earth shattering, these algorithm tweaks can still affect your rankings both positively or negatively. Most often these algorithm changes in fact go unnoticed. In cases when an algorithm change does affect your ranking, it is best to seek SEO advice to see how you can adapt your strategies to accommodate these changes. If you know that you are already using sound SEO strategies though, perhaps you should rethink your overall website strategy because the competition’s site just might really have more relevant content to users than yours. Remember that though search algorithms are far from perfect, what they are striving to achieve is to give more relevant results to users, so that a competitor’s site that jumps up in rank, might really have made improvements that are deemed by search engines to be more important in terms of relevance.
• Competition is steep – As mentioned above, you should consider the fact that there’s always thousands of other site owners and SEOs trying to grab your current SERP position. So even if you are ranking pretty well, don’t take things for granted and keep your content as fresh as possible. Keep abreast of search developments so that you can also make necessary on-page SEO adjustments when needed. As for link-building, while you don’t have to put as much as effort as when you first started, don’t miss an opportunity to get inbound links.
• Hackers and spammers can wreak havoc – Having their websites hacked and malicious code embedded in their pages is every webmaster’s nightmare. True, you can just clean up the code later on, but with so many websites and so many pages to monitor, plus so many other more pressing and interesting matters to deal with in real life, it is no wonder that sometimes it is search engine bots that discover the malicious code on your site before you. This means that your page will get flagged by search engines, and of course will automatically affect your ranking. In cases like this, all you really need to do is to clean up your site, and submit your link for recrawling. If worse comes to worst and your site has been removed from the search engine’s index, you can contact Google to ask for a reconsideration. They really do manually add to their index sometimes, but since they are busy, it is perhaps a smarter idea to just submit your site’s links for recrawl since bots do their rounds of the web regularly enough these days for you not to worry about being out of the loop for too long.

In the end, just respond to fluctuations in your page’s rankings the way you do with life’s ups and downs – roll with the punches and just do the best you can.