DILEMMA:
There’s a dog at the back door barking like mad and scratching at the doorframe.
There’s a webmaster at the front door screaming incoherently about his site being de-indexed.
QUESTION:
Which one do you let in first?
ANSWER:
Easy one… the dog. At least he’ll shut up if you let him in.
Google Panda, Penguin, etc….
As everyone within earshot of the webmaster world is aware, Google recently did several updates named after cute animals and rocked the entire webmaster world. You can tell this by reading the posts in a plethora of webmaster forums with names like:
- “What Google Panda Did to My Site”
- “Google Update Killed My SERP’s”
- “Google Swiped My Credit Card Pin and Moved to Mexico”
Read a few of those threads and you’d halfway suspect this algorithm update made the search so exclusive that for the average search term absolutely no results are available. It just returns a blank page. It has to, since everyone that speaks says their site got de-indexed.
The Good News
It’s impossible for *everyone* to have been hurt by this update. Every time one site comes out of number 1 position, another moves to number 1. That’s just reality. Is their update perfect? Hell no. But cheer up, there will be another in a few months, at which time everyone will be sure THAT one is the worst thing to hit the web since Justin Beiber fan sites. Time to figure out how to be the one that moves up when the others go down.
[HINT: Most likely the answer is “add sterling content” instead of spinning articles and hiring moronic linkbuilders to fake your way to success, but if you do that and it works I’ll expect a kickback.]
Shaking Our Fist at the Sun
It’s worth remembering that though a decade or so back, Google was an upstart trying to unseat such giants as Netscape and Lycos… TODAY they have more money than most countries. Not most *small* countries… most countries. We can kick and scream, but it’s like complaining about the weather. Those that are wise act accordingly. When you wake up and it’s cold, you don’t go into forums and rant about the unfairness of cold… you go put on a sweater.
Improvise / Adapt/ Overcome
Don’t waste time shaking your fist at the sun or claiming you’ll use a different search engine. They still have more users than marijuana and changing search engines for your personal use is like pissing on a fire. Be realistic. Yes it sucks to lose rank, but unless bitching about it has a salutary effect the rest of us don’t see… put on your big-guy britches, accept that life isn’t fair, and figure out how to move forward.
That’s my two cents. If you’d rather keep ranting, knock yourself out. Just sayin’.
Rob Jones for President 