My Site Is Gone!

July 19, 2010

Yesterday your site was in the top 5 results in Google for your keywords. Today your site is nowhere to be found. You spent the last week building new links to your site. Did you overdo it? Did you "break the rules"? What happened!?!

First, take a deep breath and relax.

Good.

Now, let's talk about why this happens, why you usually shouldn't worry about it, and when you should.

Why Your Site Disappears

Especially when your site is new, it is not at all unusual for it to be ranking very well one day, and then disappear from those rankings the next day. This is especially true after you do some link building to your site.

Here's a scenario:

1. You build a brand new site (or go back to work on a site you haven't done anything with for a while).
2. You start building links to that site.
3. After a few weeks your site jumps into the rankings for the keywords you're working on. Yes!
4. Another week or two later it disappears from those rankings.

It's at #4 that most people freak out, but you really shouldn't. That's because of #5:

5. A few days later your site pops back into the search results, often in a better position than it was before.

If you're not doing anything spammy or evil, #5 is very likely to follow #4. Let's talk about why.

Why Does Google Do This?

It might seem like Google's goal is to give you a heart attack, or at least put the fear in you, but it's really not (though those two things might be side effects of what they are doing).

What's happening is what's commonly referred to as the "Google Dance." You see, Google has a massive index, which it updates on a daily basis as it discovers new links and makes adjustments to old links, removes dead pages, etc. But because Google's index is so huge, it takes a while to recalculate all of the ranking information for your site in among all of the others.

I'm not sure why Google doesn't keep a static version of the search results up while making these adjustments, but they don't. Perhaps it would require too much overhead, so it's just easier for them to do real-time updates like this. Whatever the case, these updates mean that your site will jump around in the result list, often disappearing altogether for a couple of days, until Google finishes its little "dance", at which point your newly acquired links will often make your site appear even higher up in the results than it was before.

When Your Site Doesn't Come Back

If your site does not return to the position it was before (or at least on the same page) within a few days (at most 3 in my experience), the next step to take is to make sure that your site is still indexed by Google. To do that, go to Google and do a site search on your domain name, like this:

site:jonathanleger.com

Replacing, of course, jonathanleger.com with your own domain name. If Google returns a list of your site's pages, then you're probably fine. If it doesn't, that means Google has decided that something you did was bad and has removed your site from their index altogether.

Coming back from being deindexed is tricky, and is beyond the scope of this blog post. More often than not your site will still be indexed even if it doesn't come back into the rankings.

Why Didn't My Site Come Back?

The primary reason this happens is that you got too many links too fast and then stopped getting links altogether (or slowed down a lot).

You see, if you get a huge number of links to your site all at once and then stop growing your links, Google will rank your site well for your keywords pretty fast for a while. But once it sees that your links have stopped growing, it assumes your site's popularity was short lived and drops it back out of the rankings again.

That makes logical sense. If a site is suddenly popular because of some big event that happened which caused it to get a lot of publicity, it makes sense to keep that site high in the rankings for the duration of that notoriety. But once the jets cool off, it doesn't make sense to keep the site ranking so well.

That's why it's important to grow your links slowly over time. If you tapper off your link growth (or just get a small number of links over a long period of time), then Google doesn't usually drop your site out of the rankings like that.

So instead of getting 1,000 links in one week, getting 10 a day for 100 days will keep your rankings stronger for a lot longer! If you've chosen your keywords carefully, your site is likely to hold its position until a competitor comes along and gets more links than you — in which case it's time for you to go back to work and go through this experience all over again.

Summary

Google will often drop a site from the rankings if you get too many links too fast and then stop growing your links altogether, so be sure to grow your links slowly over time if at all possible. But even if you do everything right, Google will "dance" for a while after you grow your links, bouncing your site around in the search results for a few days before it settles back down.

One more point: once your site has been established for a while (usually six months or so of steady link building), the dancing tends to stop happening so much (if at all). At that point your site can usually sustain short bursts of big link additions without Google going crazy on you. In the beginning though, you just have to expect this kind of bouncing around.

Please post your thoughts and questions in a comment below.

Posted by Jonathan Leger | Filed Under Search Engine Optimization, Blog | 124 Comments

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Free, Easy Backlinks Using Google Alerts

June 28, 2010

Webmasters are constantly in search of new and creative ways to get backlinks to their web sites in order to improve their rankings in the major search engines.

One free, easy way to get backlinks is to monitor forums where people are discussing your areas of expertise. This is really easy to do with Google Alerts.

Simply create alerts for each of the major keywords in your industry, and set the alerts to monitor "discussions" only. Click here for a snapshot of some alerts I've setup to do this.

I personally recommend you use an RSS Reader to keep track of these alerts, which is a lot easier than keeping track of email notifications. Google even has a handy built-in RSS reader that you can use if you don't already have one (thus the "view in Google reader" link in the image above).

How this works is simple: each time Google finds a new discussion that is related to the keywords you specify, it makes a note of that in the RSS feed. You can then scan the feed for threads where you can jump in and respond. Most forums let you have a keyword-rich link to your web site in your signature, and so you get free links by joining in these discussions. Those links help your ranking in the search engines over time.

Doing this also establishes you as an expert in your field at these forums, which at a busy forum can be just as valuable as a #1 ranking for your keywords. Not to mention the direct traffic you can generate from your signature links.

How many threads will Google find that you can respond to?

Well, as an example, the "Discussions" alert for "internet marketing" over the last ten days has generated 350 question threads on 140 unique domains. By "question thread" I mean a thread whose title is a question (e.g. "Where do I find a list of blogs to submit comments?" — that's a real thread). The question threads are often the best to respond to, since they establish your expertise, but you can, of course, respond to any thread that you feel you can contribute something to.

I wrote a script to extract only the questions from the RSS feed, since I find those to be more valuable. Getting free links on 140 domains in 10 days isn't a bad deal at all! And that's no doubt going to grow over time.

So if you're needing some free links, head over to Google Alerts and get started following discussions related to your keywords!

Please post your thoughts and questions in a comment below.

Posted by Jonathan Leger | Filed Under Traffic, Search Engine Optimization, Blog | 133 Comments

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An argument for content spinners.

May 26, 2010

I spend a fair amount of time on a few Internet Marketing forums, mostly searching for threads discussing my areas of interest. Obviously one of those interests is content spinning.

In case you're not familiar with what content spinning is, it's basically formatting an article with code that allows for a random selection of synonyms to generate unique content.

For example:

The {quick|fast|speedy} {brown|tan|beige} fox {jumped|leaped|soared} over the {lazy|languid|slothful} {dog|canine|pooch}.

That coded content can be used to generate a variety of different sentences by randomly selecting one of the synonyms found inside the {|} for inclusion in the generated sentence. Using this kind of "coded text" on full articles allows you to generate a large number of articles that the search engines see as "unique content."

Sounds like a great idea, right? Not everybody thinks so.

The Controversy

In reading through the many, many forum threads discussing content spinners lately, it seems that people almost always fall into one of three categories:

1. They hate spinners because they feel that they just generate unreadable garbage.

2. They hate spinners because they feel that, even used properly, the content created does not add any real value to the web.

3. They love spinners and use them in every aspect of their search engine optimization.

Let's discuss each of these points of view one at a time.

Hate Group #1: "All Spinners Create Garbage"

In my mind, the group that is completely convinced that all content spinners generate nothing but unreadable garbage have very little real experience with spinners. I do, of course, understand and agree with the idea that you should not just push the synonym button and keep whatever the content spinner adds to your article without modification. If you do that, even with a spinner as highly advanced as my software, The Best Spinner, you usually end up generating articles that read very badly.

However, that's a very irresponsible use of a content spinner. A good spinner can be used to generate a large number of quality articles if the user takes a few minutes to clean up the synonym selections that the software makes. Unfortunately, a lot of people who use spinners don't take the time to do this, thus giving all content spinners a bad name.

Even so, to make the blanket statement that "all spinners are worthless" because of the actions of some spinner users is like saying that all prescription medicine is bad because some people overdose on it. A content spinner can be a powerful tool, and can also be a garbage generator.

Computer programmers have a saying: Garbage In, Garbage Out. That axiom certainly applies here. The quality of a spun document depends very much on the time and effort the user puts into that document.

Hate Group #2: "Spun Articles Add No Real Value To The Web"

I'm much more sympathetic to this point of view than the first. I understand the argument that spinning a document doesn't add any new knowledge or understanding to the web in general. I can see where somebody who feels that way is coming from.

However, syndicating articles through sites like EzineArticles.com doesn't add anything new to the web either, and yet I daresay that almost all of the people in this hate group have nothing against article syndication. What's the difference? The only difference is that with mainstream syndication you're putting the same exact article in many places, whereas with article spinning you're putting the same information worded differently in many places.

So unless a member of this hate group also feels that article syndication adds absolutely no value to the web, it's really hypocritical on their part to have this point of view.

I don't agree, though, that putting well-spun (or even just syndicated) articles in many places on the web doesn't add to the overall pool of knowledge. In my mind, the more places that a well written, educational article appears, the more chances it has of being read, the more people that will benefit from it.

The flip side is also true, of course. A lousy article can also generate a lot of misinformation — but that's where reader discernment comes into play. Misinformation was alive and well long before content spinners were created!

Badly written articles don't prove that content spinners are worthless anymore than a badly made smoothy proves that a blender is worthless. If what goes in is bad, what comes out will be bad. Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Love Group: "Content Spinners Are My Bread And Butter!"

For every spinner hate post I've read on the forums, there's another post talking about how wonderful spinning is and why you should be doing it. I agree. Used correctly, content spinners can help you with search engine optimization in two major ways:

1. They allow you to get links to your web site without manually writing hundreds of unique articles one at a time.

People often post articles to article directories in an effort to get links from other sites to their own site. These links improve your web site's ranking in the search engines. But it takes a long time to write hundreds of unique articles one at a time.

A content spinner makes this much faster by allowing you to create spin-formatted articles that generate dozens or hundreds of unique articles in a tiny fraction of the time it would take to write them all one by one. This saves countless hours of precious time, allowing you to leverage your time much more effectively.

2. They prevent the problem of your syndicated article outranking the article on your web site because they're duplicates.

Has this ever happened to you: You post a new article to your own site, and then submit that same article to some of the major article directories, with a link back to your site, only to find later that the search engines are putting the syndicated article higher up in the search results than the original (if your original is anywhere to be found)!

It happens all the time. That's because the major directories (especially EzineArticles.com) have millions of links into them which give them a large amount of authority in Google's eyes. That means that an article posted on EZA can rank very well without many links to the individual article, whereas you have to do a lot more link building to get your article ranked on your own site.

Google makes it clear that for any given keyword search they will only show one copy of any given article. So if both EzineArticles.com and your own site host the same article about "green widgets", Google's only going to show one of the two articles in the "green widgets" search results. Unless you do a good bit of legwork in advance, EZA is going to win almost every time because of the site's authority.

Content spinners solve this problem by making it easy to generate unique versions of your own site's content for posting to major article directories. That way the search engines see the two documents as different from each other and prevents the article on your site from being filtered out of the results without all of that extra backlinking.

Another advantage of this is that it gives you the ability to have multiple listings for a given set of keywords in the search results. So instead of only the article on your site showing up in Google's results for "green widgets", both the article on your site and the EzineArticles.com article have a chance of being in the top ten. This greatly improves your exposure and traffic potential.

(A word of caution: EzineArticles does not want duplicate content to be submitted to it. So you have to really work hard to get a unique version before submitting it to EZA. The Best Spinner has built in Copyscape checking so you can ensure that your spun version will actually appear unique. All the same, proceed with caution when it comes to EZA.)

In Summary

Are content spinners worthless garbage generators? Yes, if used incorrectly.

Do content spinners not add any real value to the web? If not, then neither does article syndication which nobody has a problem with.

Are content spinners powerful tools for improving your search engine rankings? You betcha, which is why they are so popular these days.

Do you agree or disagree? Please post your thoughts in a comment below.

Posted by Jonathan Leger | Filed Under Search Engine Optimization, Blog | 124 Comments

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