SEO Issues

So you have gone through the process of search engine optimisation for your website, hopefully through 4Ps Marketing , and as a result your pages are where you want them to be in the rankings or at the very least on their way there. However, while performing the regular ranking checks of your pages you discover, to your horror, an SEO issue: your pages are nowhere to be found.

The most probable scenario is that your pages have been dropped because they’ve triggered something to do with the Google Algorithm . Should this be the case you’ll need to know what to do, when, and how to do it.

The first, and most important, thing to find out is if your site has really been banned. Many businesses panic when their site disappears from the search engine results pages, and rightly so. It’s a situation nobody wishes to be in. Time is needed, however, to determine whether the exclusion was just a glitch or whether it was in response to perceived rule-breaking. The best thing to do is give the situation time to settle. If you are still concerned, it can be helpful to consult a professional, with regards your SEO issue.

What’s your crime?

If you’ve gone through the search engine optimisation process, you should be familiar with the unwritten rules of the search engines. If you’ve consulted professionals during the SEO process, it’s unlikely that anything you did broke those rules, although there is an outside chance. There’s also the chance that a hacker has found their way into your code and laid some nasty spider traps, or that something you’ve done during SEO maintenance might have triggered a filter.

The best thing to do is check your files. Having a logging process for the changes on your site will make this check easier. First of all, check your security to see if there have been any serious attempts to infiltrate your site. Next, look at the changes you’ve implemented, in reverse order of implementation. Last, do a manual check of the site, doing things like highlighting each page to check for hidden text. You should be looking for the usual things that trigger search engine filters, like keyword stuffing, link spam and cloaked information. If you reach the end of your checklist and are still unsure as to which SEO issue has incurred the wrath of Google, it can be a good idea to get back in contact with your SEO company or another professional that you trust.

If you have been penalised, don’t panic. Traffic from the search engines is extremely helpful to your website, but losing it for a few weeks is not the end of the world. SEO issues can be recovered from. The important thing is to track down the reason for the penalty, and begin a conversation with the search engines about re-inclusion. Like every other aspect of SEO, patience is the key to winning this waiting game.

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