After being de-indexed and asking to be re-submitted my wife and I have had a chance to watch the response time of google answering our plea and putting us into their search engine again. We were de-indexed on a Saturday and by Tuesday we were back in the google search results–very efficient
for such a large search engine company. Three days response time was beyond my expectations of efficiency, especially considering they say it could take up to thirty days!

What we witness next was latency from google which was very unexpected but not too surprising. The day casualgamerchick.com was re-indexed by google traffic almost reached normal conditions (600+ hits a day, off by roughly 200). It seems our organic results were simply “filtered” out while de-indexed but left in the same search position the day of the re-index. However, three days later, we could have been considered de-indexed again considering the drop in organic search hits.

Why?

Three days after being re-indexed all our key pages, which were on the first page of results in google, dropped to page 70 and deeper! At this point, we saw organic search results drop as if we were not in google at all; it was another sad day. It seems google decided to drop our pages “rank” from the important search results, presumably because of the hacks in the pages. It took google three days to “catch up” and drop us down in the results probably as a result of being demoted from google days before.

In this graph from 103bees.com, you’ll see the yellow bars represent search traffic (referrals were mainly from images.google.com, RSS readers and in-bound links). April 26th was the day after being told we’re losing our indexing and the 29th was the first day we realized our site was indexed again:

After our three days grace period (or “lag”), four more days went by with 50 to 75 organic search results, most of which were our “normal” traffic from MSN and Yahoo organic search, google wasn’t directing any users to our site! Then, yesterday, everything changed again; our first page google search results were back in force and once again google was sending traffic towards the site. I validated this by doing routine queries each day for keywords we initially ranked search result one to ten to validate we were not there. Oddly, sites that linked to us with those key words were still ranking at the top but our site was not.

Why?

My guess is google has a delay of roughly three to five days for any potential shake up to occur. Although the act of being deindexed was fairly quick, we were out of the results one day after being told it was occurring and arrived back in the results fairly quickly, the organic search results themselves take time. You do not receive a “welcome back” message when you’re re-indexed so it’s hard to measure the response time from the re-index, but it’s obvious that the impact waves through the organic results for about a week before maintaining some amount of stability.

If you find yourself de-indexed and have put in a request to be included again you can probably look forward to:

• Short delay between re-indexing if your site is accepted again.
• A short burst of google traffic upon re-indexing (you get happy)
• A short burst of being thrown down in results due to the prior de-index (you get said again)
• Back in action within two weeks of the initial de-indexing (yay!)

Although the site isn’t completely back 100% it was obvious when google mixed things up with their results in the matter of hours. A day of 50 search results with a next day of 600 is a drastic difference and will be detected by most metrics overnight.

This goes to show just how big google is in the organic search market, perhaps too big. A blog is at the mercy of google and must comply to all of google’s terms of service or find their site wiped from the map–Yahoo and MSN just don’t hold up against the results you’ll get from google.

No matter how great your writing is, no matter how awesome your site looks, you may still have issues gaining traffic to your site because you’re on page 99 of google’s search results. Let’s face it, if you’re on page-3 of the google search results you might as well be on page 300. I’ve had plenty of pages arrive on page six and seven and I’ve had some clicks… but it’s never relevant. If they’ve not found a site to service their needs in the first five pages… you’re probably way off from what they are looking for, or a re-hash of something they already don’t care about.

Problem One: Effort

You’ll have to put in a lot of effort to receive page-1 or even page-2 results in google. It doesn’t happen over night, so be patient. In a highly competitive keyword space it also won’t happen on a single blog post.

Here are two scenarios, you are considering a site to write about “video games” because you know a lot about them, or “baby carriages” because you’ve recently had a kid and you feel you know enough about them to write articles involving baby transportation in the way of a carriage. Which one will be more profitable?

The average cost-per-click for a video game keyword ad is:

The average cost-per-click for a baby carriage ad is:

So, technically you’ll make more money on the keyword baby carriage as long as you realize the total searches are going to be much less (almost half says adwords traffic estimator). I don’t think it’s any surprise that more people are interested in search for video games than they are for baby carriages.

So, video games is the place to apply all our efforts, right? Maybe not. Do a quick search for video games and you’ll see something like this:

If you do a search for baby carriage you’ll see something like this:

You may discover, as I did, there are many less competitive pages for baby carriages, 323,000 compared to 799,000,000 for video games. Judging your competitive marketplace you’ll see it will be far easier to rank on page-1 on google for baby carriages and they’re going to give you better ad pricing (in general) using adsense.

What does this mean to you, the blogger? The market space is less competitive for baby carriages and thus you’ll have an easier time ranking on the first page of google’s organic search results. Less people are searching for baby carriages, however, you’re more likely to be the one getting clicks if you try hard enough because ranking for video games on any of the initial google page results is going to be a rough road. In the end, you’re effort will pay off much higher for something with less search results.

Problem Two: Luck

There is some luck involved with organic search. Some days people won’t do that many searches for your content, or, if it’s season dependent, some seasons may receive less organic search results. The next nature of luck… are the competitive sites trying to rank for your keywords any good at it?

To change your luck, you can do some deeper research and check the top ranked sites to see if they use the meta-keywords field or have content that’s really relevant to the search keywords. You can take what could be random luck and focus it into a well thought out plan and avoid having to rely on a lucky roll of the keyword.

Luck also plays into the niche field you’re getting into when writing content. You can start writing about a topic that’s rarely talked about on the Internet and then, one day, it becomes a huge hot button topic and you find yourself getting traffic you never though you’d get. Luck can be awesome at times.

Problem Three: Google Magic Sauce

How organic searching works is a mystery, a well-understood mystery, but it’s still a mystery none-the-less. SEO experts have found ways to “game the system” by making your content more relevant to google; crafting your text in a specific manner…using good keyword density but not overdoing it, is a good example of some basic SEO practices. You can take their advice and follow it like the SEO bible and google can change their sauce at any time and all your effort goes to the gutter.

Luckily for you, google tries to make subtle changes to their system and not revamp their organic search system from the ground up. Some subtle changes may indeed change how you rank in search results but those are the issues a Search Engine Optimizer deals with on a quarterly basis (usually google updates their ranks and such every three months, “big changes” will probably come at this time).

Problem Four: Relevance

Your content will have a specific relevance when it comes to how google views your site since an automated system is scanning your words, not a human. When writing content focus on what your site is about and less about other random stories. If you’re making a blog about baby carriages you probably want to shy away from talking too much about products outside the space or writing articles about other industries.

If you start changing your topics you may start arriving on page results not truly pertaining to your overall content. It will be hard to keep subscribers coming back if they think you’re about one thing but you’re really a site about something entirely different. And, adsense will start giving you ads that aren’t related to the keywords you originally did research on. You don’t want ad’s that are low pay CPC when your research ads that are high CPC.

Problem Five: Patience

Don’t expect to rank the day your site opens up. It may take a few weeks or a month before you see a single organic search arrive on your site. Using google analytics or 103bees to monitor your organic searches will allow you to see what’s going on in terms of search traffic. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, patience is key to so many areas of a good blog or website.

Google likes sites that grow slowly, over time, they also give higher weight (or so people say) to sites that are well aged, so your competitors whom have been around for six years or more will usually show higher than you for the same keywords. That’s okay, people don’t always click on the first result in google, they’ll read the meta-description that google presents before clicking (usually) or at least the title of the result. They also may click on many of the first page results while doing research.

Keep at it for six months or so and see what you can do with your site. Watch the search results to see how people are finding your site and focus on what’s working. It’s important to realize this may not be what you want to work in all cases, but making money sometimes requires you to do things you may not want to do (in moderation anyway).

Problem Six: Niche Market

This is, by far, the most lectured topic in search engine optimization and web marketing in general. Selling a product someone else already has market dominance over is going to be frustrating and if you’re a low-budget shop (or have little time) try sticking to something that’s not so overdone…baby carriages for instance. If you’re not passionate about the topic you can look around for something else or do some research and learn the topic anyway, perhaps you’ll grow fond of it.

If you really want to do video games or something like that, pick a specific genre of video games (Role Playing Games, Racing Games) or a single video game fan site and dedicate your time to it. Just remember, if you grow bored of that video game you’re still going to have to maintain the site if you want to bring in ad revenue. As a blogger who writes about video games I’ll tell you up front: it’s a long frustrating road before you gain any type of search hits that net you revenue.

If you want to write about “news” on your topic make sure their is a lot of news going around because you don’t want it to dry up and go stale. News sites also require much more effort and consistently daily blogging (hourly is best) to keep people interested. News, on the Net, doesn’t last long so you’ll always be searching for the next hot story.

You can pay USD $5,000 in consulting fees to learn this, or take my word for it… targeting a niche market is going to be the difference between making some money and making nothing. Affiliating with a niche market is also a great idea if you don’t plan on selling products yourself and play to rely on ad-revenue to make a dime (more dimes with affiliating + ad’s than doing only one). Provide niche market content to help your readers make an intelligent decision about a product and continue to update it to keep those fans coming back for more.

Have Fun!

If you want to write daily content you must enjoy it or it will grow more like a “real job” that you hate to commute to each day. Enjoy yourself, have fun writing content and be smart about what you’re doing.

Good Luck!

The one I’ve used for most of my sites is 103bees.com. It focuses on natural search traffic and builds simple bar graphs to show you what you’ve got for traffic now and allows you to see your referrals against your organic searches. It will enumerate a list of all your recent search hits, the time they arrived and builds keyword lists and search engine page results so you can analyze your daily traffic and make preemptive strikes for content.

103bees is an indispensable tool for search engine optimization (SEO) and internet marketing – everything you need to know about your search engine traffic in one place!

The first appealing feature? It’s free. You can sign up for an account immediately, add the code to your site and start seeing users arriving via search. Then you can analyze what the landing pages, build a tag cloud of your keywords, see a total aggregate of all your configured sites together (I’ve got over four sites configured in mine).

I’m not a 103bees spokesperson but I’m impressed that the site stays up 24-hours a day and gives me real time statistics for no cost to me. I might as well return the favor and tell folks why it’s so damn awesome. Take a look at some of their screenshots if you’re afraid to sign up for a free account right now.

I use 103bees during the day and google analytics before night to run some in-depth analysis against my site(s). 103bee’s real-time data means I can see what people are arriving for with query keywords now and react immediately by providing content based around the keywords to rank a bit higher in them.

They do have a humorous breakdown of the most popular searches on the Internet right now along with the all-time most popular keywords–funny stuff.

I understand Google Analytics is free but when it comes to real-time statistics Google doesn’t cut it. Having a few free SEO tools in your hands will give you far more power to understand all the dimensions of your website without having to rely on guess work.