So this morning I woke up and did what I typically do early in the morning - Google searched a variety of search terms to test various keyword phrases. While this is always important to do, there is something especially fulfilling about seeing yourself ranking number one for your key search words over and over again.
Now, imagine my surprise when not only was one of the particular sites not ranking number one, but it wasn't number two, number three, or number four. It wasn't on the first page, nor the second, nor the third. In short, a year of hard work vanished in an instant.
After a few minutes, it all came back. Then it vanished again. It came back. Then vanished again. After a bit, about half of it came back entirely, and the other half was just gone into thin air.
As I am sure you can understand, this led to a large amount of panic, anxiety, and worry as I searched and searched for an answer. I posted on forums. I tried emailing people directly. I read every Google help article there was. In short, it appeared that somehow we had obtained some kind of penalty, but I could not figure out why.
I checked Bing and Yahoo - no issues. This made me think it was something Google specific. More hours pass, as I desperately seek to figure out the problem.
Suddenly, within the space of a few minutes, the site once again jumped back to the front in the number one position. I checked all of the various keywords, and it was the same across each and every one of them - number one yet again.
The question you are likely asking yourself right now is - what happened? And, for the first time in my SEO career, I literally have no idea. This is a mystery that is the nightmare of every SEO professional, when something weird happens unexpectedly in a search engine, and then you cannot figure out what exactly happened.
Thankfully, things are back to normal now, but you can bet that I will be stressed about this and fearful of another surprising recurrence in the future.
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