A Word About Recent Organic Rankings Volatility, White Hat SEO, and My Ability to Work Autonomously
Recent Google updates
The last year has been laden with both confirmed and unconfirmed Google search engine algorithm updates. Several months into 2023, it seems there is at least one algorithm update each week, if not more. Rankings for almost every niche and industry have been up and down more than an elevator in a busy 100-plus-story building. Unfortunately, there is not necessarily any end in sight. Here are just a few of the confirmed Google updates that have occurred since Q4 in 2022:
- April 2023 Reviews Update
- March 2023 Core Update
- February 2023 Product Reviews Update
- December 2022 Link Spam Update
- December 2022 Helpful Content Update
- October 2022 Spam Update
And that list does not account for over a dozen unconfirmed updates in the same period. There used to be between two and four major updates (confirmed or otherwise) per year each year through 2020. Things remained pretty stable, with an increased number of updates in 2020 and 2021. But the search engine results for most industries have gotten very volatile since the end of 2022, and that trend has continued and even gotten more intense in many people’s eyes.
Many SEOs, evidenced through forums and blog comments, feel Google is intentionally causing earth-shaking changes in the SERPs over and over to discourage focus on organic rankings and have businesses in a situation where they have no choice but to allocate larger budgets to their paid efforts through Google. Thus, Google’s overall profit for this quarter and likely the next several will increase significantly. It only lends further credence to this theory when you consider Google went through some very difficult layoffs in Q4 of last year, right before the holidays. It would make sense after cutting around 6% of its tech team that Google is making a concerted effort to keep profits high as well as to prevent layoffs from ever happening again.
Whether the above is true or not, staying the course with tried-and-true white hat tactics and effort is the only approach you should be considering. Keep generating the most user-focused and thorough content possible. Continue striving to create assets that generate links on their own. Don’t let any outreach efforts for big-time quality backlinks slow down. Keep a vigilant eye on your on-page and technical SEO. If possible, turn up the velocity at which you do these things. Maybe these efforts do not yield results right away. However, you never know when the algorithm update might drop, which sets everything normal and sensible again, or very close to it. If that is the case, you will want to be ready and in a great position. You also do not want to be in a dubious position if another link spam update drops, and in the months before that, you were buying lower quality links at scale – bad could become much worse or even zero through a manual action.
Examples of the recent volatility in organic search rankings
Here are a few examples of how rankings have been going up, down, and everywhere in between from my very own experience:
You can see the recent periods are almost short peaks and valleys that look like waves. This is after the site enjoyed 100% sustained rankings for about 18 months after heavy work pulled them from the far outer limits of pages 5-10 to the top third of page one. This might very well be the immediate future of search rankings on Google, short bursts of higher rankings and organic traffic followed by equally short periods of noticeable decreases in both, wash, rinse, repeat. However, I still advise you to stay the course with your on-page, technical, backlinking, and content efforts.
How a shift to white hat tactics brought us up from the depths
The other thing you might have noticed is the extreme improvement in the rankings in each of those graphs in INSERT DATES. We still enjoy page-one rankings for these keywords even in this time of volatility, although we might be in the second position one week and the eighth position the next week, then vice versa.
To simplify the process I used to facilitate these improvements and the resulting exponential organic traffic increase, these are the primary steps that I took:
- I purged our site of toxic links by having them removed and/or no-followed and then proceeded to disavow the same links.
- I altered our blog and overall content strategy to ensure we were creating the best content in our niche by doing things like using Brian Deen’s skyscraper technique, creating eye-catching and informative graphics that were sure to interrupt scrolling/scanning, and much more. The focus was to see a tremendous increase in time on page, and we did.
- I started focusing on the quality of the links I was pursuing rather than quantity. Dozens of times through these efforts, I found that one very hard-to-come-by, do-follow, high-quality/authority link that was properly and contextually placed on a niche relevant site did more for us than hundreds of lower or average-quality links used to.
How my independent work facilitated these rankings increases
As you can see in the keyword tracking pictures above, our rankings increased over the summer of 2020 and have since climbed to page one and have remained there. From March 2020 until December 2022, I worked completely remotely. During this period, I would send a report weekly as well as a monthly report. Other than that, I would occasionally interface with my supervisor via phone or Skype. Otherwise, I was left to my own devices. So, all the results that you see are from the planning, execution, and upkeep that I alone performed. The only exception is all of the technical efforts were taken care of in 2019 when we were redesigning our site.
The move back to the office in late 2022 was company-wide and unrelated to performance, as you can likely surmise based on the results I got working from home. The point is that I have over two and a half years of experience working remotely with great success during that period.
Although I do work very well independently, that does not mean I do not also have great success with collaborative efforts. Most of my career has seen success through collaborative efforts with managers and clients alike. The ultimate point is that regardless of the situation, I have always been results and success oriented and will always continue to be.