But therein lies the conundrum. When your site is hit by three or more updates to Google’s SE, how are you supposed to determine what factors are to be fixed, what factors are relevant, and what factors are responsible for regaining your SERPS?
The delay is so long between fixing things and any updates that it is well nigh impossible to know that if you fixed ‘x’, that was the reason for ‘y’ change in the SERPS. That is why we need Ken’s study results. He’s already said fix what you can with Penguin & Panda. That should benefit your visitors.
There seem to be different groups of people now:
- Those who are not hit by any thing;
- Those hit by one or other or more who did the Action Plans and recovered somewhat;
- Those hit by one or other or more who did the Action Plans and didn’t recover at all;
- Those hit by one or other or more who did some of the Action Plans and didn’t recover at all or got worse;
- Those who did nothing and recovered somewhat;
- Those who did nothing and didn’t recover;
- Those who are lost (like me); and
- Those who gave up.
- The last group is: Those who never cared in the first place for whatever reason (traffic not Google dependent, site is not online traffic dependent, etc.)
Some groups are easy to identify if you belong to them or not, but the most difficult groups are the #2~#4 groups because hard data is so rare. And if you did some or all of the Action Plans, and you’re convinced that you did a good job, yet recovery hasn’t happened. Then you cannot conclude that you covered the key points essential to recovery. You’re more likely to give up or stop caring. I think that’s where I am right now.
But a scary conclusion that I’m coming to, Google doesn’t want you to KNOW why your site isn’t doing so well. 200+ factors in their reckoning, plus their own weighting of sites anyway, perhaps EVEN they don’t know the REAL reason why a particular site isn’t doing well. Google remains relevant for now… but I miss the quirky sites I used to find. I was looking for stuff about Singapore for a friend of mine, and all I could find was the usual Tripadvisor sites/etc. I couldn’t find anything that was actually INTERESTING to read. The SBI sites are just invisible there now.