Feb 04 2009
In Part 1 of this 2-part series, I mentioned that unless your site's ranking have dropped by hundreds of positions you shouldn't worry. But what happens if your site does drop by a lot, or worse, disappears?
First of all, you need to remember that search engine rankings are never permanent; they're always changing. Aside from the fact that search engines constantly tweak their (very secret) algorithms, new sites are being indexed and added to results every day. Some of those will even be competing for the same spot(s) you are.
There's just no way to really tell how long a change will last. It may last only a few days or weeks. And it could be as long as a few months. It's not entirely unheard of for a site to rank really well at first, drop drastically (or disappear), and then show up again in a decent spot. It's also not uncommon for a site to go up and down for a while before staying around the same position. (And by "staying around" I mean hovering. Even then, it's not stable or permanent.)
So what do you do? You just keep an eye on your rankings and conversions. And you keep on working hard on your SEO efforts. Really, that's all you can do. Hey, no one said this stuff was effortless.