Hi Gang,
There has been a lot of talk on various Discussion Boards recently
about getting “Google Slapped” or “Google Danced” and what do
you do when it happens?
The first thing we always find is actually to recognize this for
what it is and don’t panic.
OK, easier said than done but it’s the best advice I can give.
The reason I say this is as follows.
If you are in a full blown state of panic then there is no chance
that you will think coldly and dispassionately (as you should)
about what to do about your sites present situation.
OK So what are my best tips on dealing with this situation when
you first encounter it?
1. Go away and make a coffee or a Cup of your favourite
beverage and stay away from your PR or Laptop for about 5 minutes
at least.
There is nothing to gain and everything to lose by blindly pressing
all sorts of buttons, editing and re-editing pages and generally
behaving as if you spent the previous evening sleeping on a Termites
Nest.
If you’ve been “Taken for a Tango” then you certainly won’t be
able to redress the situation within minutes by any of your
actions as things like this don’t get resolved that quickly
despite what the various Gurus’ promise. But by giving yourself
a bit of breathing space and the ability to think calmly then
your next actions could turn out to be really productive.
2. Return to your work station and now having had a degree
of separation between yourself and your perceived problem now
you should examine in logical order what it is you have done
to your site over the previous 2-3 weeks to make sure that the
current adverse situation is not arising through any fault of
yours.
This is easier done that you think and I can think of numerous
occasions where there have been fairly massive and drastic “plunges”
in SERPS due to innocent errors on the part of webmasters. You’d
be surprised how effective and damaging an errant “noindex”
tag left in the wrong place on a page can be.?
3. So having completed a fairly rigorous and thorough
investigation of your current situation you now establish that
indeed this has not arisen through any actual proactive act of
your own what could the cause be and what can you do about it?
The first and most usual blame centre for most problems like
this is usually aimed at the current back links activity. After
all isn’t this usually the cause of most problems such as these.
The answer to this question is usually and most emphatically
not. The reason for this being in a nutshell (as I have explained
to clients and members of SLS on numerous occasions) if this
were the case then it would be the most used and abused form
of SEO known to mankind.
After all if you can get Google to trash your competition as
a result of an influx of back links then why waste money on
your own SEO, just load up your Competitors site with loads
of dubious links and then sit back and watch your own site
serenely rising through the ashes of Google trashing all your
competition.
Not going to happen is it?
Google may be many things but it is simply more complex and
“aware” of this type of false activity than to be that simplistic
in its analysis of your site.
The answer to your question may lie purely within the subject
area known more informally to you and I as a good old plain
“Google Dance”.
The real reasons for Google Dances are hidden deep within the
mists of SEO Folklore and not even Google will admit to them
actually officially happening or for even such a phenomena to exist at all. Ask most Webmasters whether they exist and most will reply most definitely in the affirmative but again most know very little about it.
Most webmaster “guestimates” about “Google Dances” revolve
around Data Centre Upgrades that occasionally throw out results
across the board that are all inconsistent with each other.
The first thing to accept is that there is no such thing as
“one” Google Index and in fact Googles Search Index is made
up from Hundreds of Data Centres spread worldwide and therein
lies the problem. It would be a complete non starter for them
to update all at once and as such Google is in effect constantly
updating itself somewhere as they roll out one algorithm change
after another and they don’t always get it right (few of us do 
).
Rather than spend this entire newsletter on the details of such
phenomena rather lets concentrate on what to do to get out of
it if it occurs.
I can only stress here that our experience here has to be put
down as anecdotal but we have found through quite considerable
“non scientific testing” (i.e. we don’t sit around here in white
coats and run around the office waving clip boards etc) and most
of our techniques emerge through quite considerable trial and
error. So our view is that the quickest way to get out of the
effect of a Google Dance is to concentrate on freshening up as
much as possible the IP spread of the Back Links Landscape you
have created for your site.
Bookmark like heck basically and bookmark anything that links
to your site so that not only are you creating fresh IP’s for
the Bots to discover but also add to the power of the links you
already have. Sooner or later the added power of your existing
links plus the appearance of more and varied links will tip the
scales back in your favour.
This is where the large links lists that we feature within the
Members download area of the SLS Support Forum come in handy.
Don’t worry about Page Rank or whether the links are dofollow
or nofollow, just widen that IP spread like mad.
Lastly, just as an adjunct to the above, I’ve spoken to quite
a few SLS members recently about a resource we’re opening up
shortly that will assist the above “big time” as they say.
We’ve been working on two separate Projects recently that we
decided to bring together and they are as a follows:
1. A Resource of EDU Blog Urls that are useful and available
for Blog Commenting.
2. A Similar resource to the EDU List but concerning
mainstream Urls ( i.e. .coms, .net and .org’s etc) and as such
a much bigger resource.
To give you an idea of how big a resource and database we are
processing at the moment, we have over 24 million Blog Domains
and over 36 million Bog Urls we are processing our way through.
Now we are refining the searches here down to only consider pages
where the Actual Page Rank of the Page is quite reasonable and
not just the domain Page Rank.
At present we have over 40,000 Urls where the PR is 2 and above
(actual Page Rank and not Domain Rank) and we have over 8,000
Urls on EDU Domains with a Page Rank of 1 or over.
We are going to be making these available to members on a regular
basis at quite frankly what is effectively “at cost” i.e. at
$27 per thousand Urls or $37 per thousand Urls to non members.
Now in each pack there will be 1,000 Urls and the page rank will
be spread between 1 and 4 (again actual PR of the Page) and will
be spread in proportion. This means that approximately in every
1,000 Urls there will be a spread of rank as follows:
400 PR 1 Urls
300 PR 2 Urls
200 PR3 Urls
100 PR 4 Urls (SLS members will get a few PR4+ plus some EDU
Urls thrown in as a well.
Now this will also be available as a forthcoming service via
the Warrior Forum plus a few others and places will be limited
but as before first choice option goes to members of Simple
Leveraging. We aim to only have about 400 members of this project
as obviously we want to try and limit the exposure of the information.
Now a similar service has just been launched by one of the “Gurus”
and they are charging $197 for 1,000 Urls which we think is a
complete over the top rip off adn that is why our service is
effectively at cost.
Why?
Well as I said, we have nearly 36 million potential Urls to
work with and probably over 400,000 with Page Rank so that is
more than we can handle as an in house resource and our aim
here at Simple Leveraging is always to try and look out for
our Members interest first and foremost.
This project is called “The Lost Art of Conversation” and is
ultimately an attempt to increase the quality of comments found
on Blogs and we will also be running a series of Videos whereby
we analyse a series of Blog Urls with a number of suggestions on
how to engage the Blog owner to publish your comment plus leave
you with a nice in-bound link.
I will send some more information about the “The Lost Art of
Conversation” in the next 24 hours to keep everyone informed
and up to speed so to speak.
In the meantime get back linking!!
Speak soon
Steve
