I’ve recently started running my own personal website design blog, based around me as a student designing websites. Anyway, I had posted an article about “My top 5 website layouts” about 2 days ago. I was averaging about 100 unique visitors per day, then suddenly, I get a jump to over 300 in one day.

I checked my results and it’s down to this 1 article. So I searched google for “top website layouts” and there I was, ranging from 2nd to 6th position. I was bloody happy to say the least!

I thought I’d give it another search, just to see what has happened, and I’ve totally disappeared. The only mention of it is a link to dzone.

Very weird stuff. One thing to note, whenever I post a new blog, I add it to digg, dzone, propeller and about 3 other sites.

I’m hoping it’s the “sandbox” and google aren’t messing me around

Jack

I have just had the same thing happen – a site that was getting good traffic just suddenly disappearing from the SERPS altogether, real bummer – an eBay listings site, maybe Google doesn’t like them…

I saw the clickthroughs coming in to my page from Brent Crouch’s link above (thanks Brent!), so I thought I’d drop by.

I want to clarify a few things…

Significant content changes *will* affect rankings – but the key here is “significant”.

Recently, we redeveloped a client’s site, yet maintained the site structure, and largely maintained the same content… But we saw rankings drop 50-100 (or often more) places down the rankings for about 2 months.

Again, this was a *significant* redevelopment – although site structure was maintained, and page content was kept very similar, title tag structures etc changed significantly.

After about 2 months, the site started ranking well for the “new” keywords, and rankings improved for the old keywords too (not quite to where they were previously – but much higher than where they were).

Brent [Crouch] – by all means, optimise your sales page for conversions… Don’t worry about making those sort of tweaks.

HOWEVER – Chances are, you’d have better success with SEO if you had a whole series of lead-gen pages (valuable articles, linkbait etc) that you focussed on ranking, and drove that traffic into your electronic products page.

In my humble opinion… Pages can’t be optimised for both conversion and SEO – it generally requires compromising one or the other… and when you compromise, it’s not “optimisation”.

Re: the “dropped from Google” article (linked above) I was referring to sites disappearing when no significant changes were made to the site.

This is a phenomena where sites disappear and reappear in Google’s SERPs after 48 hours – which I suspect means it’s simply a data centre issue (i.e. – Google is changing the data centre they’re using or something similar).

Re: the significance content changes in general – if read up about the history of the Hilltop Algorithm if you haven’t read about it already. It shows (if you collect enough data on ranking factors) why you end up with two different conflicting sets of data – one where on-page changes are very important, and one where on-page changes are largely unimportant.

(In the data I’ve pulled together, I also found some conflicting data on whether Domain Links or Page Links were more important… again, this could be traffic affecting how the algorithm is applied… but that’s another story…)

Anyway – rabbiting on enough here.

I think you both have my email address now – so don’t be strangers.

Brent (the other one)

Just replied to your ticket.

Yeah, as far as SERP rankings go, I believe several years ago the on-page factors played a much bigger role than they do today. Of course the content is looked at, but I update pages quite frequently and very rarely see it directly contribute to changes in rankings.

So while I wont’ say it “WON’T” effect anything, I will say it’s unlikely.

Josh

That is good to know. I’ve got a site that is doing very well in the search engines. I use the site to sell a digital product. I’ve been wanting to “tweak” the page some to try and raise my conversion rate. I have been very reluctant to do so, because I don’t want to screw with my rankings.

Since you haven’t seen much of an affect from doing this, I think I’ll give it a try.

Thanks for the recommendation. I’m not much of a believer in content changes affecting your SERPS these days. That’s not to say I’m right and he’s wrong, but from my own experiences in the past year or so it just seems like content tweaks don’t cause much to happen.

P.S. I did receive your email and I’ll get back to you on that sometime today

Brent Hogdson wrote a post about what to do if your site mysteriously disappears for your top keywords. I was a commenter to this post because I was experiencing this issue at the time he wrote the post.

I’m not sure if what he described as a “data update” applies to your circumstances or not. Luckily, in my situation it did and my rankings came back within a few days.

One of the things Brent mentioned to me was a lot of people start updating and making changes to their site when their rankings disappear. What would have been a temporary loss of rankings becomes permanent because of all the “tweaking” they do to the site during the “data update”.

It’s a good post that is worth reading.

http://www.brenthodgson.com/marketing-case-studies/what-to-do-if-your-site-is-dropped-from-google.php

Good Luck,

Brent Crouch