Beware the Google new page “bump”

by Eric on November 19, 2008

I don’t know what Google calls it, but I call it the “Google bump”.  That is when new pages soar straight to the top of the rankings.  The problem is that a week or two later, they sink right back into oblivion.

I’ve been studying this effect for a couple of years now. I can repeat it consistently. Within a week, I can get a page ranked within, or near the top 10 for my targeted keyword phrase. Within two weeks of that page hitting the top ranking, it sinks back, sometimes several pages!

Check your expections, and scrutinize your SEO firm!

First of all, the reason for this post is to inform small business website owners to be aware of this pattern. An SEO firm can (if they know what they’re doing) get your page to quickly rank for a search phrase.  The temptation is for them to send you this ranking report saying “look what we did… you’re #3 for [insert search phrase]!”     The problem is that they don’t follow up two weeks later with “your page is now #89 for [search phrase]“.

So, just be informed that you will see quick results from optimization efforts, but those efforts will last about two weeks, then die off quickly.  These are expected results… it just happens that way.  But don’t let your SEO give you some hokie explanation for the up and down.

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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

Bernard Baker February 2, 2009 at 2:42 pm

Hello Eric. I love your site.

I have one quick question. Can you insert HTML into PHP?

I want to know what a title, a description, a keyword, and an h1 tag would look like for php.

I haven’t coded in years, but would appreciate your help. Thanks, Bernard

Eric March 5, 2009 at 2:57 pm

PHP and HTML are separate. So a title tag is HTML. If I wanted to have PHP spit out a title tag, then it would look like this.

echo '<title>Your title here</title>';

echo is a command that says spit this out to the browser. Make sense?

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