SERPs

Search Engine Results Pages = SERPs

Who knows what magic algorithm Google uses to calculate what to return on those search pages? I’ve read about them. I’ve studied them. I’ve tested them. I don’t understand them. The more I know, the more I realize how much I don’t know.

I have a site that I’ve been trying to get ranked high. Per my research and everything I know about the on-page and off-page SEO and the competition, it should be doing pretty well. When I published it, it was #8 on the first page. Since then, it’s been slowly moving backward.

Down, down, down, into a burning ring of fire. – Johnny Cash

It’s been beyond page 3 for the last week or so, i.e., it doesn’t exist. I was bummed. What was I doing wrong? I knew a couple things I could do to make it better. I needed to work on the off-page back-links. I’ll get to those after some client work that needed to get done.

I check again this morning and it’s back on the first page! #10 with a bullet! I do some research on it and it seems that Google rolled through another one of my sites and recorded a bunch of links from those pages.

I guess my point is that random chance still has something to do with how you are rated on Google. The more I know, the more I realize how much they don’t know. They apparently are not quite networked with God yet, so they don’t quite know everything, all the time, everywhere. Yet.

If you are doing the best SEO you can and not getting the results you expect, give it some time. Time seems to be the great equalizer. Random chance will settle down over the long haul and the trends will stabilize.

You’ll get there. It will just take a while, or maybe a bolt of lightning.

SERP Position by Date