There are times when your very existence is effectively controlled by someone else. And when that someone else pays you no attention, you start to feel very neglected.
Such is my case with Google. But for the record, I’m not actually complaining.
Google is the gate-keeper, in a sense, to countless hundreds of thousands of websites. Ones that without Google to parse and find keywords, would never be found otherwise. I freely admit that my site is one of them. While I might be deemed “authoritative” for surprise parties and Rug Doctors, that doesn’t make me authoritative for all.
Despite all that I post about Critical Mass, I still only rank in at #61.
About two weeks ago, Google did another algorithm update. Google does this on a quasi-regular basis. (It’s something the SEM industry watches intently.) Almost every time Google does an update, it wreaks havoc. People who ranked high before find themselves buried. Sales drop. People panic. Think of chickens with severed heads.
There’s a reason it’s called the Google Dance.
It appears I’m caught in this instance. Previously, I was fairly immune. But something I’ve done (presumably) has had a fairly serious impact on my Google traffic — down over 80%!
Fortunately, I have no need to panic. It’s just my blog. But I’d feel bad for anyone else out there who had to contend with this on a business level. That said, I still need to figure out what happened. ‘Cuz somewhere, somehow, this factors back into the work that I do here…
