This is how Google Dances - An Illustrated Look

Kickflip

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Just re-verified my account for Google Webmaster Tools, and saw some interesting data which I was not aware of before.

My site was getting around 200-500 impressions daily from December 10th to 17th, then on December 18th, it jumped up to 1000 impressions, and on December 19th and 20th I had 8,000 impressions, and on December 21st back to 1000 impressions, and from then on around 10-50 impressions daily to this date. I am now trying to remember what I could have possible done around that time to regain those rankings.

The website was 11 months old, and I have used it for mostly redirecting with no content, but for several days I had some content on there. I have done comment backlinks to it, but nothing serious. The domain is an exact match .info domain for a keyword which gets around 27,000 searches per month, but those impressions were NOT for that keyword.

The keyword which I was ranking for (I was rank 5-7 when I was getting 8,000 impressions daily) was listed in Google adwords as getting 70,000 global exact searches per month. It is 1 word, so broad/exact is the same. From 8,000 impressions, being listed in spot 5-7, I got 50&30 clicks each day respectively. The #1 position was the official site, I was ranking for their website name.

What to learn from this:
Sometimes Google just wants to test your site. If you dissapoint them, you may end up worse then when you started off. What I mean by that is don't push your rankings until you have good content which will satisfy your visitors and keep them on your site. If you have a horrible bounce rate, you might have just blown your "interview" for a great position. The difference between #7 and #1 can be you missing out on 99.5% of the searches. Every time you make major changes, watch your traffic. Check your rankings daily.

Images to help illustrate it all clearly:

My Domain Name - Exact Match - .Info - This keyword phrase accounted for less than 1% of my impressions.
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1 word Keyword - Title of a Major Website - Alexa Ranking around 3,000
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The day before the jump started - Top rank is main keyword (unrelated to my domain name, it is the exact title of another Major Website)
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The jump data - Ranks and Impressions - Top 3 keywords are variations of the Main Keyword - Next 3 are variations of my exact domain name (completely unrelated to Main keyword which I ranked for) - Final 2 are variations on Main keyword again.
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Hope some of you find this information useful in some way, or use it as a reminder to check your rankings as often as possible and keep a record of any changes you make. Every little thing you do has an impact on how Google sees your site, so if you rely on Search Engine traffic, keep a detailed record, and try to be able to undo your changes in case of Google dropping you like a bad habit.
 
Interesting read, it's always handy to see pictures too. Thanks Kickflip.
 
Good post. Really emphasizes the importance of bounce rate, which is something I think most of us overlook.
 
Interesting read, it's always handy to see pictures too. Thanks Kickflip.

Good post. Really emphasizes the importance of bounce rate, which is something I think most of us overlook.

@Kickflip, Pretty interesting.

Thanks guys. Not everyone will find the information useful, but I know it will benefit some of you. It is always interesting for me to view REAL numbers with photo proof to clarify things.
 
Great eye on you Kickflip. This is what I was planning to do with my latest long term project site. We might never know the entire complexes of algorithms that the big G is doing, yet we always can add a new piece to the puzzle, like Kickflip's theory. This seems logical too.
 
hum interesting datas... Is there anyone else who is experiencing / has experienced the same ?

Othersiwe welcome back kicklflip :)
 
I'm glad someone cleared this up for the newer members because I see "is this a google dance" threads daily. Thanks KickFlip
 
Good stuff. Nice to see you back sir.

Sometimes Google just wants to test your site. If you dissapoint them, you may end up worse then when you started off.

Well said. So many webmasters just "walk away from the interview" when it starts going bad. Persistence, adaptation is key.
 
Ah yes - I have one of those as well. Once a month it pops up for top 5 on all it's 10-sih KW's only to get buried again in a few days.

The funny thing is that my visitors stay over 4 minutes but the bounce rate is over 60%!

Still trying to get the site back - if the circle is to be trusted it will get back in top 5 in 3-4 days ;) Wait and see!

Nice post, nobody talks about this

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analytic's pic

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Ah yes - I have one of those as well. Once a month it pops up for top 5 on all it's 10-sih KW's only to get buried again in a few days.

The funny thing is that my visitors stay over 4 minutes but the bounce rate is over 60%!

Still trying to get the site back - if the circle is to be trusted it will get back in top 5 in 3-4 days ;) Wait and see!

Nice post, nobody talks about this


Great post, thank you. It is bizarre how similar the boosted impressions/click through/rank is, and only a few days apart in December. I did some major changes to my site to stop the redirect and put some real content back on it, so if I get the boosted rankings again I will post an update. My content is only 1 page, but it is stuffed for the main keyword in the content/title etc.
 
Great post, thank you. It is bizarre how similar the boosted impressions/click through/rank is, and only a few days apart in December. I did some major changes to my site to stop the redirect and put some real content back on it, so if I get the boosted rankings again I will post an update. My content is only 1 page, but it is stuffed for the main keyword in the content/title etc.


Yeah my first reaction was how scary similar the stats are as well!

One main thing I did find out that was wrong with the site was the G's webmaster tools "HTML suggestions" tab - over 60 duplicated titles and meta descriptions as well as several crawling/indexing errors.

I'm guessing that's holding this site back as I have tons of unique content, videos, and very strong off site SEO (best in my niche when I checked with open site and other tools). Many PR4, 3 and 2 pages in there.

I did put in canonical URL's as well to protect my self from more duplicated content penalty as in the post-panda world it's a huge deal. All on-site SEO is.

And I took care of site loading time to bring it down to 1.86sec's and outsourced cleaning up the code on my theme as well since I suck at coding my self.

SEO is waiting game and I have all the time in the world ;)

I'll post some updated stats if/when there is some movement.
 
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