Blogging, GIGO-lessness and John Cusack-ing – A Cocktail for Fixing a Slipping Google Ranking?

John Cusack © by Gudlyf

John Cusack: A Mild Obsession

I love John Cusack (as an actor/writer). I will see every movie he’s ever in, forever. I don’t care what the reviews are,  I’ve seen enough of his films to know that he is one of my favorite actors and anyone who disagrees with me can suck it. He works for me.

What works for you?

What this has to do with blogging: micro-fanaticism. Everyone has their fascinations that for business or personal reasons, they want to keep reading about, seeing images about or hearing conversations about. You have something that, if someone gets you going talking about it, you won’t shut up, and you’re probably the smartest person in the room on that subject.

If you aren’t the person that people have decided to fixate on, you can be the curator of best of the topic that  certain people are fixated on. If you’re really good, you can turn the things that go with that into a career, or leverage your knowledge on a related topic into a boost for your current career.

What this has to do with Google rankings: as we will discuss shortly, consistency is often a key element to recovering a slipping ranking. Obsessive consistency to be exact. Think about it – is there anything you used to do that you aren’t doing now? Why?

Have you made changes to your site that might be the culprit? Even design changes may be responsible for a change in results. I once had a very lovely client who sold timeshare resales. At the time we met, he didn’t know the difference between a page view and a hit.

After he changed his web design, hits went down. I pointed out that page views were consistent and that hits were down because technically, a hit is any request for an element on the page, including images.

A page view is what it sounds like – a view of a page. So since the new design had fewer images, of course hits were down.

Of course, hits were as irrelevant then as page views are becoming now. But he didn’t know that.

The point is: for all you know you might not have a problem at all. One ranking may be down while another is up, leaving you with more targeted visitors. If your rankings go down and sales go up, do you really have a problem? Consider all the elements.

GIGO: No One Is Obsessed with Crap (Well. No One Sane.)

Oscar the Grouch Graffiti © by bixentro

I learned this one when I was first learning about computers. GIGO stands for Garbage in, Garbage Out.

The relevance to our discussion is that in order to be knowledgeable enough on a topic that people want to listen to you, you must be consuming the cream of the crop of thinking on the topic or at least a related one. Success in the blogosphere and social media is as much about consuming content as it is creating it.

You have to know how to pore through the yawn of empty, senseless, pointless random yammering to find the sweet golden nuggets.

So many elements are attached to the quality of your content.

Whether anyone will link to it, talk to friends, come back again, bounce back to the search engines – and some of these end up impacting search, particularly in the case of Google.

Now, you don’t need a Bieber-sized fan club to make it online, or for your business to get a steady stream of leads from the web. But a few hundred or thousand coming back every month and buying/subscribing won’t hurt your bottom line. That core repeat business group can also be referred to as a group of fans.

Name ten fans of garbage.

(Oscar the Grouch doesn’t count.)

Blogging:  A Bit More Important All of A Sudden (again)

will write for chocolate © by caparica

If you’ve been watching Google’s last few algorithm changes, you may have noticed that it’s not only the frequency of updates that seems to have saved certain blogs from a dismal fate. It’s the perceived quality of updates, partly the fact that they’re attached to known authors.

For now, I won’t say more than that on this topic. Let’s go back to what that means to you and your Google strategy: content production. Not just in quantity but in quality.

The smart bloggers, writers and authors know that they can’t necessarily spin gold out of straw every day. That is: most of the time, there’s no remarkable news, discovery or observation for you to draw on that’s relevant to what you want to talk about, even when the other content on the web in your area is absolutely stunning. And yet, your job, each day, will be to create this constant stream of readable, actionable, consumable content, day in and day out.

One of the many things bloggers who have either recovered (or never lost) their rankings have had in common has been consistency of quality content, on a tightly structured topic. (Yes, if you have a copy of my Evergreen Traffic System or Rescue Your Blog, I’m repeating myself.)

So if you’ve lost your rankings and you’re already blogging, think about those three things:

1. What’s your John Cusack as it relates to business blogging? Are you still talking about him/her/it or have you wandered off topic too much?
2. How much can you reduce the garbage that’s coming in to your brain on the topic and simultaneously expand the amount of quality content you consume?
3. Can going back to basics fix your ranking problem?

Now, keep in mind this isn’t the only possible solution to recovering a good ranking, nor are these the only possible set of problems you have with your rankings. An algorithm is merely an extremely complex formula when you break it down – so there must be a way to reverse engineer, from positive outcomes, how to fix your rankings.

However, remember that there are hundreds of variables going into this equation, and that what fixed another site may not fix yours. At the same time, re-committing to what worked before is not to be discounted as a solution to a re-occuring problem.

When I wake up each morning, my breath is not exactly fresh as a spring breeze. So I brush my teeth. It fixes the problem. If I stopped brushing my teeth, I wouldn’t be surprised that my breath stopped being fresh.

Sometimes the simplest thing is the solution.

And if it’s not? Come on back and talk to me, and we’ll see if we can avoid jumping off that bridge.