If you are ethical, search engine optimization efforts can take a long time and a lot of effort. So what happens when you find your rankings have disappeared one day?

I Lost My Rankings - SEO Nightmare?

It was a Monday morning. It had been a "lively" weekend. I had not touched the computer and was glad for the break. Staggering out of bed around the crack of noon, I nuked some coffee and sat down at computer. As it made horrible grinding noises while booting up, I wondered if a particular client would be ranked two or three today on Google. I flipped open my browser, searched for the term and spit coffee on my screen. Egad, I wasn't in the top 10! Holy... I scrolled through page after page or results and was not in the top 100. I wasn't even in the top 200. Damn, this client had paid a sizeable fee over the year.

What did I do? I went back to bed. It was going to be one of those Mondays.

Admittedly, going back to bed was only an option after I had gone through this experience a number of times over the years. The first time, I nearly had a seizure. After that, my reaction slowly evolved from sheer panic to a yawn. Why? For the same reason you should not panic.

Search engines are dynamic beasts. They do strange things and they do them often. Whether it was the panic caused by the old Google Dance or some new algorithm development or just a day's variation, most rankings do not go from top 10 to infinity in one day unless a site has undertaken something very unethical. Instead, the rankings bounce around and then pop back. In the situation above, the rankings were back on Tuesday morning. Yes, I breathed a sigh of relief, but I knew they would come back. It might take a day or even a few weeks, but they will come back.

The point you should take from this is that panicking is not going to help anything. If you are playing the game straight, you should not run into a sudden catastrophe. Yes, you may drop 20 or 30 spots because of some new tweak from Google, but you can deal with it. Instead, the rankings bounce around and then pop back. In the situation above, the rankings were back on Tuesday morning. Yes, I breathed a sigh of relief, but I knew they would come back. It might take a day or even a few weeks, but they will come back.

Search engines are dynamic beasts. They do strange things and they do them often. Whether it was the panic caused by the old Google Dance or some new algorithm development or just a day's variation, most rankings do not go from top 10 to infinity in one day unless a site has undertaken something very unethical. Instead, the rankings bounce around and then pop back. If you drop, don't rush off to do something. Like fine wine, give the rankings a couple days to rebound. More often than not, they will.