How to Regain Traffic After Google Updates its Algorithm?

This can be a tough task, but there are things we can do to regain our traffic and ranking after Google updates its algorithm. It would be necessary to clean up our website and wait that our website will be brought to its original ranking in the next update. In this case, Google will re-crawl our website and it will assess whether the website deserves the original ranking. The next update could happen within months, but could be more than a year. Our website will be badly affected if we need to wait for months before the next update. In this case, we could speed up the process by filing a reconsideration request. We could do this through Webmaster Tools and it is possible that our website will recover its position before the next major update occurs.

There are some cases when reconsideration request is necessary. As an example, it is difficult to control where our links originate from. Some link farms try to hide their tracks by randomly adding URLs to hide websites that they want to improve. However, Google will immediately penalize all websites in the link and we could find that our ranking is affected. In this case, we could file our reconsideration request and we have become the victim of improper linking strategy. It is not possible to get links removed from those link farms, but we could ask Google to remove the negative value of these links. The purpose of SEO is clear. We want to gain higher rankings, by doing proper legitimate methods. When devising a SEO strategy, we should make sure that we control our links.

There are principles that we should consider when we try to regain traffic. We should ask whether we really build our website for users and not search engines. We should check whether we have created things of value for our visitors. To improve traffic and reduce our dependence in Google search results, we could try to have more significant presence in Twitter and Facebook. If we have opinions, we could participate on social media websites, forums and blogs. It is also important to become more consistent content publishers. We could also aim to be the true leader within our field, so people will keep looking for our content, although we rank poorly in search engine. Other than focusing on social media, we could also gain more traffic by making our website more exciting. We may encourage more dynamic blog commenting and guest posting. We could also post videos in YouTube and encourage viewers to visit our website to get more interesting content.

There are also things that we should stop doing, such as building spammy links manually or automatically. It is a bad idea to pay for links and we should stop looking for other shortcuts to success. It is a waste of time to exchange links and we shouldn’t bother getting links from unknown directories. We shouldn’t aggressively target specific keywords and avoid implementing doorway pages and cloaking.