I came across an interesting poll on Search Engine Roundtable which was asking webmasters and SEOs how secure they felt in the search engine rankings they had achieved, being retained.
This really got me thinking about my clients and the Vertical Leap website itself, about how secure we are in the placements that we have worked so hard to achieve. In the poll, I answered that I was “somewhat secure” – I am confident for the vast majority of the results we have achieved for clients have been achieved on merit, and as a result, most of them should sleep relatively easily at night safe in the knowledge that they are doing well.
However, even with the best search engine optimisation companies, I really don’t think that anyone can ever be “absolutely certain” about retaining those precious rankings, and the business that they drive – there are a number of reasons that lead me to this conclusion, some of which I will run through below.
First of all, no-one completely knows the ins and outs of any of the major search engines algorithms – I doubt that there is any 1 person anywhere who has all the keys to success, and as you can see from the various different tactics that can be employed in SEO, there is no 1 right recipe for success – what works well for one website wont necessarily have the same impact on every other website.
Sure, there are plenty of things that we DO know are algorithmically important – but do we really know the precise weightings of all these factors that we are being measured against?
Because there are always factors that will always be out of our control, we cannot ever be completely comfortable in the rankings that we achieve and the traffic and business that this brings to a website.
There is also the potential for algorithm changes – for most of the time that I have worked in SEO (over 3 years) there hadn’t been too many really big algorithm changes that massively impacted on my clients – sure there have been minor ones, but when I was training up as an SEO, I was reading about apocalyptic type algorithm changes that introduced so much flux into the rankings it was untrue.
Until recently, most of what I have seen with search engines is Everflux, where the are smaller incremental changes to algorithms which result in the near constant change in ranking positions, particularly in the more competitive areas that we work in – and this is still going on – Google makes so many small changes to their ranking system that the rankings are always changing.
However, certainly in the UK where I draw most of my experience from, this summer that changed. First of all, around May time, Bing replaced Live search, and this changed a lot of my clients rankings around in positions due to a new scoring system.
There have also been major changes in Google recently starting with the tweak that Google introduced to reduce the dampening effect that they had introduced on .com domains from ranking in the UK, which frankly has caused carnage – every day, I am still finding websites ranking in Google UK that have absolutely no business being there – which I have reported on a number of occasions on this blog.
There was also Google Vince, which has had an effect on placements this summer, but to be honest, it’s a bit of a mess sorting out which websites are affected by Vince or the rash of foreign websites that are currently polluting the Google UK listings.
As well as all these factors, we then have Google Caffeine – where Google have taken an unprecedented step of allowing people to test out the new version of their search engine ahead of launch. From what I have read about Google caffeine and from a number of checks that I have performed, I don’t think that this will involve a substantial change to the algorithm, as its predominantly a re-written engine under the hood using essentially the same algorithm.
However, having said that, some of the websites I track look like they are in for some big wins in terms of ranking positions when this does go live – and for my sites to get these boosts, it inevitably means that someone elses (and maybe lots of someone elses) rankings, traffic and sales are going to reduce as a result.
Also, just because techniques have worked for the last few years, it doesn’t mean that these techniques are going to remain effective – certainly, the way that Vertical Leap manages a client campaign has evolved immeasurably over the years that I have worked here, and we are always looking for new and effective techniques that will allow this service to evolve further.
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