The recent Google changes…

There was a great blog post on SEO Blog today that covered the recent Google changes and how they impacted many sites out there.

Traffic trend

This graph exemplifies what many people saw after the Places rollout and the indexing issue that happened around the same time. From the article:

    Some of the sites associated with the indexing glitch quickly came back, whereas others seemed like they were hosed for weeks and headed toward the path of perpetual obscurity. … The blue line is Google search traffic and the gray is total unique visitors.

Now thankfully for this site, the trend was only low for about two and a half weeks before it bounced back.

Traffic back up

Our clients and prospects saw much the same trend as well. We had many sites that weren’t rising in the SERPs for a couple of weeks and it had everyone in the SEO community scratching their heads. Some high quality sites dropped while spammy sites stayed high, while new sites couldn’t even rank at all. Thankfully things evened out and we’ve had all of the expected keywords ranking in the usual timeframe.

The article goes on to warn marketers to use these times as a warning shot to diversify. Establish solid link building profiles, don’t stick to one or two link building channels, and stay vigilant. Good advice for any online marketer!