{"id":3172,"date":"2008-05-24T14:38:46","date_gmt":"2008-05-24T21:38:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/?p=3172"},"modified":"2008-05-24T14:42:34","modified_gmt":"2008-05-24T21:42:34","slug":"what-happens-when-google-stops-ranking-you-for-all-of-your-very-best-search-terms-nothing-if-youve-built-your-blog-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/3172\/what-happens-when-google-stops-ranking-you-for-all-of-your-very-best-search-terms-nothing-if-youve-built-your-blog-right\/","title":{"rendered":"What happens when Google stops ranking you for all of your very best search terms? Nothing — if you’ve built your blog right"},"content":{"rendered":"

A funny thing happened on the way to Unchained:<\/p>\n

Right about May 16th, BloodhoundBlog fell off of Google’s radar. Dozens of search terms that have always been reliable sources of inbound traffic — terms you might think of as being BHB’s “short head” like zillow.com<\/em> — suddenly stopped producing.<\/p>\n

I watch our numbers pretty closely, so I was aware of the sudden drop in traffic. It wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened: We had plummeted in the SERPs for terms on which we had always been very strong.<\/p>\n

As to the why, I know nothing. It’s plausible we hit a Google penalty, but I have no certain knowledge of this — nor do I ever expect to have any certain knowledge of this. It’s also plausible that we ran into a hiccough in the search algorithm.<\/p>\n

Certainly we have done nothing even remotely Black Hat. To the contrary, we lean all over the idea of clean, content-based SEO, and we lean even harder on the idea of building communities of like minds, not search-borne aggregations of fleeting butterflies.<\/p>\n

The fun part was, I didn’t have any time to deal with it at the time. Saw it happen. Figured out what had happened. Had some ideas about why. But I was up to my ears in Unchained work, plus money work on top of that, so I had no time to deal with the problem.<\/p>\n

Finally on Wednesday I was able to drop a request for review on Google, telling them that I’m a good boy and don’t deserve to be treated like a bad boy. Presumably, in due course, they will review the site and either agree that this is so or tell me explicitly what they want me to change. This could take weeks, possibly months.<\/p>\n

But here’s the interesting part of the story:<\/p>\n

It does not matter.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The growth of this community has never<\/em> depended on Google. Obviously some<\/em> people found us that way for the first time, but the overwhelming majority of our regular readers found us through some kind of referral mechanism:<\/p>\n