A few weeks ago I wrote a post on the recent fluctuations within Google and the new Google algorithm that they rolled out last month. The “Farmer” update had a major impact on certain sites and generally it was targeting poor quality sites or sites that it thought were not of a good standard, perhaps with a lot of duplicate content. We are still finding the aftershocks of this event a bit of a headache but results are seemingly shaking back out where they should be.
Now is the time to do a clean-up on your site if it was badly affected. Using Google Analytics is a good method of seeing how it impacted your website and which areas need the most work on. We knew that duplicate content can potentially cause problems when Google indexes websites but it also affected those with poorly created content or thin substance content which it deemed unsatisfactory. Ideally you want to be removing automatically generated content from your pages where possible or even just use a robots.txt file to block them.
By using Google Analytics you can determine which pages cause the most trouble and subsequently you can delete them or tidy them up to make them more suitable. Also, try to create unique content on the ad-heavy pages where possible as these pages are obviously ones you would need to keep in tact (given that you probably have contracts with those advertisers, or they have paid you for your ad space). Look at pages which don`t generally receive much traffic normally and that you could perhaps do without and either remove them or make them more content rich and useful to the site as a whole. There is no point in having a website with 15 pages when it can fulfil it`s purpose with just 5 or 6 and have a more concentrated browsing experience. Some sites can get carried away and believe that the more pages you have the more links to the site exist and therefore the better the authority would be but this is not the case and it can be detrimental to the whole if you have pages that are just unnecessary.
Regarding the fallout of a drop in rankings and the consequences of this, obviously the biggest obstacle is not necessarily the solutions discussed above but more how to handle the customer expectations when the proverbial mud hits the spinning “air-pusher”. So what can you say that isn`t immediately patronising or seemingly avoiding the issue? I find that the best policy is to say that the new algorithm update has caused a fluctuation in the rankings and that everyone has potentially been affected and that during this transitional period the search engine is indexing the site according to it`s new regulations and will eventually shake the listings back out and that the site should re-appear where it needs to be. This will of course be based on links attached to the site and the overall quality but hopefully this won`t be an issue with your campaign.
Ideally the customer will see that it is out of your control but that you are confident in a return to performance and that this is a temporary situation and you have done what you can to pro-actively resolve the issue.
Author:
Nick Rinylo 
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